Living Through History

Donald M. Hall, a retired stock broker from Minneapolis, had a funny but serious op-ed in today's Star Tribune. Here's an excerpt:

Times are the most uncertain since the Great Depression, I'm told. Can I arise in the morning, walk out the front door into the clean air splashed by the morning sun and embrace the day? No, sir! Times are uncertain. A meteor might drop on my head.

Sometimes it's so numbing that it's hard to know what pair of pants to put on in the morning. A prudent man must be cautious.

I guess it didn't used to be this way. During World War II, you could count on things. A young man was almost certain to get drafted. And the women were left to take care of the children, or move to the city and work in a factory. But apparently everyone felt sure that all would be well once the job was done in distant lands and the men came home. Apparently everyone knew that the invasion of Europe would succeed, Germany would embrace us, and that the Japanese kamikaze pilots would eventually become industrialists and sell us cars.

Complete text of Hall's "Surely we've never seen an age as uncertain as this one"

It's easy to interpret Hall's words as a reminder of how our country has been through hard times before (so suck it up, you wimps), and I'm sure that's part of his point, but I also take it as a reminder of how uncertain life seems all the time -- and what it's like to experience it vs. reading about it as "history."

I remember just how unnerving it was to live with the threat of imminent nuclear war. Knowing that, I have tried to extrapolate what it must have felt like to wait for news to arrive from Europe and the Pacific during World War II, not knowing what country would fall next or whether a brother or father would come home. Or to see lines of people waiting for food during the Depression, while your father extends credit at his small shop to every person with a hard-luck story. The best books about history -- fiction or nonfiction -- manage to communicate what an era was like for the people who lived through it, instead of making it seem as if it all had been predetermined to come out the way it did.

Of course, we're always living through history. We're just a bit more conscious of it lately.