Our past follows us, creeps up on us when we least expect it, and informs our day-to-day decisions. It cycles over and over again, retaining the same framework and adapting to our current phase of life. Sometimes we recognize these cycles and learn from the past, but oftentimes we are too distracted by details to identify the pattern.
I had heard the axiom ‘History repeats itself’ throughout my academic career, understanding it mostly in historical contexts unrelated to the past four generations. This past spring break, as I baked in the sun at the mid-mountain lodge in Steamboat, Colo., a retired skier from the South asked me a question that applied that axiom to the most recent cycle of historical repetition.
After replaying the rehearsed set of answers to the series of commonplace questions regarding my college career, he asked me something my resume couldn’t answer: whether I thought the world is a more violent place today than it was in the 1950s and ‘60s when they were in college.
“When I was a journalist at my college newspaper, we had a lot to write about,” he said to me. “It was a revolution here and there at every moment. It seemed like we were involved in all of it, both violent and not.”
He grew up and wrote in the midst and aftermath of the Vietnam War, Cold War, Civil Rights Movement, and much more. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. drafted thousands of Americans and the fighting resulted nearly one million total war-related deaths on both sides. And the Civil Rights Movement ignited horrific riots and fostered brutal police-citizen relations.
“Back when I was growing up, people every day in the United States and overseas were frequently at risk for violent outbreaks for a variety of reasons,” he said to me as I tried to travel back 50 or 60 years. “Nothing going on today compares to the upheaval going on when I was in college.”
I stayed mostly quiet during the conversation, occasionally interjecting with probing questions: To what extent did you feel you had a voice as a college student in altering the course of violence? What sort of resistance did you experience?
“I felt like a had a voice. I probably felt like I had a much stronger voice than I actually did, and in turn, published some pretty radical stuff,” he laughed. “Because emotions were so heavily tied to all of these issues, the resistance often surpassed passivity and escalated into violence. How could it not when you’re looking at these types of issues?”
Part of me couldn’t imagine holding an anti-Vietnam War picket sign in one hand and a racial integration banner in the other, all while tripping on acid.
The other part could not remove myself from the global cataclysms pouring out of every corner of the world, each amplifying the other in rapid succession.
Maybe I was just disillusioned by my short 19 years of life, but maybe this man was a bit too. Do our circumstances have more in common than either of us thought?
The next day, Colorado College sent out the ‘First Mondays’ email, announcing that ambassador Christopher Hill would be speaking on the foreign policy of the Obama’s last two years in office. Maybe he could provide me with an answer, I thought.
His insightful talk acknowledged the plethora of violence in the world in which we are living. It reminded me that we are growing up with the wars in Iran and against ISIS and Putin parading in Eastern Europe. This in turn let me to reflect on life within the United States: the physical outbursts of animosity surrounding the Ferguson Riots, mass school shootings like the one only 20 minutes from my high school in Newtown, Conn., and more.
“History repeats itself,” Hill said, and then it all made sense. The framework for global violence has not changed since my friend was in college; the brutality has merely molded around the present day. Conversations like the one I had between ski runs that day allow us to temporarily ignore the details and recognize the seemingly elusive pattern. That, Hill argued, is the core of the solution, just as the Contact Group Plan for Bosnia is the solution to our problems in Syria.
As with most of the brief interactions in ski lodges and on the lifts, I never learned the skier’s name, nor did he learn mine; however, we formed a bond because of the cyclical nature of history and our inability to ignore the past for the sake of our future.