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Let’s reconnect with our own past

A few weeks ago, yielding to the pressure and suggestions by some of friends, I installed a Facebook application in my cell phone, so now I can be in constant connection with my “friends” and with their activities and events. The key word is “constant.”

I must confess I am unsure if it is really in my best interest to know all the time what my “friends” are doing. Many times the information I receive is amazingly obvious. For example, people write, “It’s Friday!” (I don’t need to wait for a posting in Facebook to know that) or “It’s raining!” (as if they were the only ones authorized to release such sensitive information.)

So now, every time any of my “friends” have an activity or event, an alarm sounds in my cell phone, almost begging me not to forget that one my contacts thought something was important enough to share it with me.

It is important to be connected with our present, but many times, it is just a superficial connection.  Even worst, the communication is not only short, but it is also written in such a way you can almost hear Shakespeare crying.

That’s why I was happy when I recently had the opportunity to interview Virginia Sanchez, an independent historian with the Colorado Society of Hispanic Genealogy.

Sanchez reminded me that it is important to be connected with our present, but it is also important and perhaps even more urgent to reconnect ourselves with our past.

The urgency is due to the fact that the generation of people born in the first few decades of the 20th century, before World War II, is rapidly disappearing.

It can be said that’s the last generation of people who depended on the stories told by their parents and grandparents as the basis to develop their own values and identity, before the explosive expansion of mass media and modern technology.

I drew two conclusions of my conversation with Sanchez. First, our elders have stories to tell and they want to share their stories. Such a task, however, is not always easy. Second, few people among the younger generations are interested in listening or documented those stories.

According to Sanchez, the imminent disappearance of a generation of people now over 80 years of age will deprive us from accessing memories and stories from the past two centuries, and in many cases much older.

In other words, in just a short time the door will be closed forever to those eyewitnesses of a pioneer generation (think about the Latin American countries celebrating this year their bicentennial) and a generation of heroic and seldom known acts during major conflicts that changed history.

I like to be constantly connected with my present and to know what my “friends” do or think. By I also like to be constantly connected to my past, to those who silently and anonymously build the present we enjoy today.

That’s the foundation for building a better future for the next generations

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