Paper

[Varia]

I wrote this for history. I thought some of you might like to read it. Feel free to express your love or hate for it.

Today in my history class, I was told to write a paper and was presented with the topic “discuss and explain why humans have the need, the obligation, to record and teach their history”. Seeing as this was most of the day’s focus of discussion, I am assuming that I should be participating in this particular topic during my normal life. However, I do not most of the time. In my own opinions, I believe I can safely say that I really do not know why humans feel the need to do such things.

I go to school, I pay attention in all my classes, I talk to my friends, I go home, I go out. I do things. I do not, however, enjoy things that most other kids my age enjoy, such as going out to parties, the occasional use of illegal substances, or going out to the mall, just to name a couple. Throughout the duration of the class, the teacher kept referring to teenagers today, and I assuming that he meant those kinds of kids. Average. From what I have seen, heard, and experienced, kids like these need to keep a high level of social activeness, or else they begin to feel “uncool” or “unpopular”. Also, it seems that they like to get to the top of the social ladder while pushing others down to get there. If you say the wrong thing to someone, they will tell all their friends and their neighbors and their pets until everybody and their grandma knows. Effectively, this will make one person go up some on the ladder, and the other fall some. This is what I see in the general populace of students everyday. They write about these things in journals, they talk to their friends about it for hours on end. This is just a small portion of humans that I have just focused on, but it applies universally throughout the course of history, except on lesser scales. Gossip in addition to the potential raise in social status is what many people are concerned with. Don’t get me wrong, they still take part in their job, their family etc. but in their time out of those things, the “interesting” part of their life, that is what they do.

I have no idea why people like to participate in these kinds of things. I think it makes me stupider each time I think about it, because there is no point. Yes, there are important events in history, which should be remembered, explained, studied and accounted for. With knowledge about the past, we can prevent mistakes in the future. If nobody had ever documented the effects of the atom bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, nobody would know what would happen if they just loaded a squadron of bombers with atom bombs instead of some bunker busters. Ok, that wasn’t a great example, but it gets my point across. But along with these memorable events are the things that cause them. That brings me back to my ideas of people and their social status. This guy didn’t like this guy and then some miscommunication happened and now all of the sudden there’s a war. No person is better than any other person. The sooner people realize this, the sooner the world will become a better place.

Now that I have written this, and read it over, I understand my thoughts a lot better. I can now answer the original question. Humans feel the need to record and teach their history because they are insecure about themselves and their position in life. They keep it to show newer generations, which they can teach to have the same ideals and standards as themselves, thus continuing the cycle of a meaningless, spiteful existence. I have done a lot of generalizing, but believe that in a general population, this is fairly accurate.