Listening to the Past to Understand the Present

Listening to people’s stories sometimes rewires how I perceive things.

Recently, I sat down with a woman who was in college in the late 1960s. “We romanticize those years now,” she said, leaning forward. “But we were living in chaos.” She told me about walking to class when the news broke that JFK was shot. Then Martin Luther King. Then Bobby Kennedy. Kent State. “We'‘d been living in Camelot,” she said. “Then suddenly we were living in tremendous political turmoil.”

It made me think that since we’re in our own moment of upheaval right now, it’s easy to feel like this is uniquely terrible, like we're the first generation to watch everything crack open. But we’re not. People have stood where we're standing, felt exactly what we're feeling, and somehow found their way through.

There’s something comforting about that realization. We've done this before. We can do it again. That's the gift of these conversations. They’re time machines. They’re proof that we will probably make it through. They’re reminders that the story isn’t over yet.

Photo credit: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum