Changing the History Channel

The year my paternal grandfather was born the federal government officially opened an unsettled region of Indian Territory to homesteaders (evidently no one consulted the people already living there), setting off the first of three major land rushes to claim homesteads, transforming the Territory into the present state of Oklahoma. The year:1889.

In the ten years between his birth and the birth of my grandmother a number of interesting things happened. The very first skyscraper (ever) was built in Chicago, the army massacred 300 Sioux at Wounded Knee, basketball was invented, Ellis Island opened, John Muir founded the Sierra Club, 10,000 workers at Carnegie Steel went on strike resulting in more than a dozen deaths and America went to war with Spain. When my grandmother was four-years-old the Wright brothers flew for the first time. She lived long enough to see men walking on the moon.

The year before my father was born, Lindbergh flew solo across th Atlantic Ocean and in the throes of the xenophobic hysteria of the time, two anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed for a robbery they may not have committed. I don't know if it is coincidence that the year following his birth, the stock market crashed  and the Great Depression began. My mother was born at the height of the Depression and the commencement of Roosevelt's New Deal. Perhaps, more important to us in this day, somebody named Vlad Zworykin invented something called the iconoscope. These many years later we call it TV. "Let's watch the Zworykin tonight!" just doesn't roll off the tongue does it?

Nothing of great historical significance happened the year of my birth, but a few years earlier the Supreme Court ruled on Brown vs. the Board of Education, Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine and Rosa Parks wouldn't give up her seat on a bus. The first historical event I remember was John Kennedy being assasinated. The school let us go home early and when I got home my mother was crying. I remember the string of assasinations in the 1960s, JFK, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. What a scary, sorry nation we seemed to be back then.

But we are not born into a world in which the die is already cast. Maybe a 5th grader at Lowell is, at this very moment, formulating an idea that will change our world forever. Our lives are not really about history are they? We actually live in the present in which the future (and future history) are not yet determined. Those past things set the stage maybe, but we alone are the actors and the plot is still ours alone to fashion.  Future history is actually in our hands right now. Where we will go, what we will do, who we choose to be, that's all ours to control. It turns out that there may be only one point in history that really matters to us. This one moment, now.

Tim Bulone is an ardent observer of life on the swirling blue marble. He works at Davis Group Consulting and creates fine art and canvas prints which he likes to sell from time to time at http://www.MyFamilyArt.com He is an early morning pedestrian in Belmont Shore, where he resides with his wife and a variety of pets.