responsibility for the past?

I used to think learning about history was boring. pointless.

that was before I realized how it echoes into so many other things--things that are important to me. literature. art. people.

today Charles Waugh, a visiting assistant professor of english here at Utah State University, gave a talk on Finding Out in Viet Nam What It Means to Be an American. I went because I happened to be interning this morning and the isotope editors were going. so I accompanied them.

it was interesting. thought-provoking. and beautiful in many places.

I thought about how cool it would be to be so well-known, so recognized and be giving talks to your fellow academics.

I thought about how this professor was only 12 years older than me. 34 doesn't seem so far away.

I thought about the past. the vietnam war happened ages before I was born. I hardly learned about it at all in high school. Waugh's descriptions of the massacres were all new to me.

one thing he mentioned, about his own humanity being diminished as he visited a memorial to hundreds of murdered women and children, struck me--but I still couldn't quite grasp how i or he could be or feel responsible for a tragedy that happened so far in the past.

is that humanity? connections to the past? sharing, with each other and with those long dead, responsibility for all of the wrongness in the world, whether its in the past or in the future?

maybe it is.

Charles Waugh seemed to think that merely talking about it, writing about it, would make a difference. he can't change the past... nobody can change the past. but I guess he did make a difference here. I, a young, hopeful undergraduate, know something I didn't know before. I see Vietnam all green and real, a place I'd never seen before. I remember, somehow, something that happened before I was born.

that awareness... that makes the difference. it's the only thing that can make a difference. if writing keeps awareness alive in us, then I guess Charles Waugh is right.