Reverberating Ripples Of History

The effects of past events—even very distant ones—have huge impacts on today's conditions. It is a common mistake to consider only recent events when looking at the causes of current conditions and change in general. Without taking all into account, the reasons we search for to explain the "whys" of life will not be answered.

The communist Chinese leader Chou En-Lai once said in the 1970s that it was still too early to determine the impact of the 1789 French Revolution. Lena Williams, in her book on race relations The Little Things, she makes the point that black people see what some people consider distant history (slavery and segregation) as relevant today while white people do not.

Impacts of events on society do not have a cutting off point; they fade but never completely. Time and space give distance, but never can entirely cut off the effects of the past. The fall of the Roman Empire or asteroids hitting the planet still reverberate. We need to pay attention to everything, not just the stuff that happened yesterday, last week or last year.

We also need to pay attention to distant history because everyone needs and seeks that connection to their past. It is a crime if it is artificially disturbed.

Randall Robinson has compellingly explained that slaves and their descendents are disconnected from their past due to that institution. Slavery people off from their heritage. The ripples of history give people a needed connection to the source of those ripples. Everyone for whom those ripples are unavailable is unavoidably damaged. It is a type of injury that can’t be repaired, a crime against humanity. All that can be done is to try and rebuild a new source of ripples for future generations. But, even then, they will be false in some sense, an imitation of the real thing.

These imitation ripples still produce effects, though, and we need to consider them will equal consideration. They will be rippling through society just as strongly as the ones they replaced, moving societies in unforeseen directions, especially if we don’t pay attention to them.