historic_moments past putting my social history hat on for a second, every moment that leaves a trace (physical, emotional, in memory, or otherwise) is historical. keeping this hat on, because it's cozy, the moments flagged as big-h "Historical" are those that galvanize the stories we tell eachother as in "where_were_you_when", they fuel our metanarratives and serve as threshold concepts (threshold_moments?). in my three and a bit decades there's been many of these moments at many scales. but, and this is probably my presentism and geocentrism (this last word autocorrect says exists foremost en français, comme géocentrisme) speaking, it sure seems like they're piling on each other without much of a pause. (hindsight bias would seperate and flatten out those many moments to the ones that fit a given narrative, such are our individual and collective memories.) (and of course the threads that are important change with the current conditions, because aren't the histories of the influenza and polio pandemics standing out more now? or perhaps that's just me, as those two left death and disability in their wake in my family tree.) we live in the present through the past as we build the many coexisting futures. 220226 ... epitome of incomprehensibility The pandemic felt like it came out of nowhere. No recent precedents of the same magnitude. So in the early months I watched an animated-history account of the so-called Spanish Flu in 1918-20, as if I had to connect it to something. But with the war in Ukraine now, what bothers me is that it's too much like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq twenty years ago. It makes me think (however cliché), "Why haven't we learned anything since?" I don't want a repeat of my early teenage years. I don't want the background worry of sudden violence, of devastation, even if it's somewhere far away. It's not as if I'm in personal danger now, so I don't mean to be all me me me. The point is more that if people far away are anxious, how much worse is it to actually be in a war zone? 220314 ... e_o_i (and it's not as if wars haven't happened since, just that they weren't as reported on: Sudan, Lebanon, Yemen, some civic conflict in Cameroon, and that's just off the top of my head) 220314 what's it to you? who go blather from