Living in the past

[Virtual ghost]

This will perhaps even sound unpatriotic on my side but I don't get this mindset.


I live in the country where war ended 23 years ago, while many people and media often act as if this was 2 years ago. It is true that people went through horrors/mess (myself included) but the question is should we really give up on the future because of this event. There probably isn't a single day when this isn't in the news on some way due to some anniversary or trial. The idea that international court of justice organized the trials that in some cases lasted over a decade probably messed up the nation even more than the war itself. Plus opportunists did use this for political means. However nothing of this explains really why so many people agreed to this way of life. Remembering history is one thing but living it 24/7 just isn't the same thing.



However my nation isn't the only one where this is present.

On this very forum I have noticed that some would give advantage to something that is evidently out of date just because this is "tradition" or whatever. Even if they would with this actually give someone else the free hands to define future by pushing forward. Some people seem to think that everything can be static and that nothing will ever change if they want it that way, even if their first hand experience is directly telling them otherwise.



I just don't get it.

 

[Lark]

I have to say that I totally agree with this.

Its something which I think about when I see any sort of attempt revivals too, if traditions were as great as revivalists make out then they would not be threatened with extinction. Ironically I tend to think that the things that people want to revive are the things which deserve to disappear and the things which really matter and require a defence go unnoticed and under or totally unappreciated.

I have read some writers theorize about the possibility that the remoter from actual "real", lived, experience something is the greater symbolic importance it may take on, Erich Fromm wrote about how he believed this was a case in both the capitalist countries insistence upon their liberal democratic heritage and histories and the soviet union's insistence upon being "peoples democracies", he didnt think either of them were democracies at all (depending on which of his books you read he may not have believed that either of them could ever actually be democracies). That's just one example, I think there are A LOT of traditions and traditionalism which do exactly what you are talking about, fixating on a certain moment in the past and becoming "stuck in a moment" (there's a great U2 song about this).

I've thought about the symbolic importance of certain keynote causes to both liberalism, like trying to popularise homosexuality, and the right, trying to abolish taxation and eradicate any sort of a public safety net, and how they are remote from reality, I'm not sure of how badly this can effect things.

Pretty much everyone has a design for life and scheme for improvement, the world has survived some pretty nutty ones already and probably could survive others too, often what I realize is that schemers have an entirely different focus or idea about things than an impartial onlooker, opposition has another differing view again. The people who are stuck on repeat are probably another example of it.

I'm not sure what the answer is to it all as a lot of the time, seriously, its like people are speaking entirely different languages, speaking at cross purposes and past one another when any of these highly symbolic topics are discussed and a lot of the time I think other topics are entirely ignored and sometimes it feels like this the whole point (sorry if that makes me seem like a conspiracy theorist, I dont think I am, its just political business as usual).

Personally, I disliked a lot of the Somme rememberance, like I said on this forum I wondered how the Germans feel about it, they participated in it to the full, especially in the UK but a lot of the misery expressed about it, which is totally sincere, is confused and confusing, as is the pride about it too. The realities of fighting a war with Napoleonic tactics of advancing until you drop to determine your enemy's range of fire for instance at a time when Maxim guns had been developed IS totally horrific, the devaluation of life and celebration of sacrifice per se, its all horrific too and the world is a pretty different place now, in some ways, but wars are still being fought and its still seem as a great sort of resolving international conflicts.