specifically, when i was a kid, i remember "the 1960s" feeling like ancient history. i watched footage of civil rights protests and black panthers and vietnam tinged by lessons on how much progress "we" had made since then. at some point i learned that my grandad was old enough to have memories of the dust bowl, and had fought in WWII, and i remember looking at some classic dorothea lange portraits that felt as old to me then as renaissance paintings and thinking, "there's someone i can talk to who was alive in ancient history."
today i read about the fugitive slave act of 1850 and find myself gobsmacked at the year. 1850. eighteen fifty they made it compulsory for all states to return runaway slaves to their slavers! of course i already knew this information, but i haven't had occasion to really sit and think on it. 1850. my grandad was born in 1922, so his grandparents certainly had memory of 1850, and his parents probably experienced the aftershocks of reconstruction post civil war. 1850 sounds like so long ago, but when i think about how different the world is today in 2023 compared to how it felt when i was growing up i realize that it isn't very long ago at all. we act like slavery is relative to our past on the same scale as, like, the black plague in europe, or old school wars with horseback knights, but that simply isn't the case.
in the rush of every day, the primacy of now, it's easy to forget that this moment is a blip. everything will change beyond recognition sooner than we think, and this Now will be yet another Then we debate about, as if no one was there to witness it firsthand. we will pretend as though ancient wounds have long since healed, ignorant to their objective recency, to the undeniable flow of cause to effect. these scars will be shrouded in lies and half-truths but their effects will nevertheless be felt by those within them. the collective hallucination of water under the bridge comes from a desire to ignore the flood washing us all away moment by moment. the past is closer to us than we can ever fathom, like a pounding heart under the flesh of time. in this way, our wasted hours are never spent alone, for we have always already been somebody else's history books