wakingthegoldenwood:

If a person’s lifeline is a thread made up of millions of microfibers, millions of different people and paths and chances that make up that person (because after all, a person is not one person but a combined result of every person and everything that they have come across), then the history of human existence is a tapestry of threads, criss-crossing and interweaving, millions upon millions of lives and the stories that make up those lives, colours and real emotions that cut like steel, woven into this masterpiece of love and life and death and destruction, of beauty and illumination but also of loss and human suffering.

The thing is, history education has been put through an industrial assembly line required by the corporatized education system of today and drained of its life until it’s just dry compressed information consisting of not much else but dates, treaties, wars, and dead people arguing about things that seem irrelevant to us, right now, in modern day. But that isn’t how it should be. It isn’t as simple as throwing a blanket cover over history consisting of generalizations and pages of a textbook or slides on a power point- because it’s more than that. History needs to be romanticized- it deserves to be romanticized, because underneath that blanket that’s been used for ages, if anyone bothers to look or think about it, there is something living, something bubbling and threatening to burst to the surface, and it needs to be allowed to. Because history is… god, history is beautiful. It’s a tale of human fears and doubts and emotions that have survived eons of wars and geographic and social shifts, that have survived the biggest and most tremendous of changes and have managed to remain as constants throughout the tale of human existence and people that felt the same things we did, all those years ago, isn’t that just fascinating? What happened then actually happened. It was real, just like we’re real today, and that one day people in the future may look back at what is happening in our lives and reduce the Arab Spring to a one or two line definition from a glossary of a history textbook, or the London Riots to the briefest of mentions within a dusty tome. It’s not erasure we seek, it’s understanding, and connecting with other human beings, and if today becomes tomorrow’s history, isn’t it vital that we seek to understand how real and thrumming with life and vividness the past is? That it’s not just about what we can learn from it, but about what it says about the miracle of human consciousness and how it can carry on for years after we’re dead. That’s what history is about, for me. And I hope that in the future, people can see our lives as something equally as fascinating as well.