Distinction

BSKing mentioned tonight that her new hobbyhorse is the difference between "no one was talking about (insert disease) that much then," and "I don't remember people talking about (insert disease) then."  Right up my alley.  Our memories mislead us.  It came up in the context of the three-year, three-wave Hong Kong Flu of 1968-70.  If you like hard facts and have a determination to look them up, as she does, you will find that people actually were talking about it a lot.  It was in the newspapers a lot, some schools closed because there were too many teachers and students out, and there was some serious worry about how high the deaths would go.

But it was in three waves, so the deaths were broken up.  It arrived slowly and invisibly, as epidemics did them, so it never even occurred to people to close borders or shut anything down preemptively.  You would have to have some idea where to turn the water off. The danger receded in the middle because a vaccine came in.

But most of all, it was during the Vietnam war.  That not only factored in to how people perceived danger then,  it hugely affected how they remembered it later.  The war has a gravitational force for all other memories. The contemporary documents show people were actually worried.  We just don't remember it anymore. We also did not have the awareness of what happened elsewhere then. Murders in Montana were not really perceived as happening to other Americans.  They were impossibly remote. Hell, Maine and Vermont were impossibly remote, as was the top half of New Hampshire. I had relatives in two Massachusetts towns, both close to the border. Other than that, only my neighborhood existed, and the kids at church and the Y.  Unless kids died at my school, kids didn't die anywhere. People in novels and movies were more real. Yet we remain sure that we remember what was capturing the national attention then.

Longtime readers may notice that I say this all the time about what we remember about school, education,  and childhood in general. There was a time when I kept all sorts of old papers - letters from junior-high girlfriends, a diary from 9th grade,  a few school assignments.  I recall reading some in my thirties and being so humiliated that it was easy to destroy 75%.  In my forties, another 75%.  (I think I have my yearbooks and some song lyrics now.  That's it.) Beyond my humiliation, I was struck most forcefully by how little it resembled what I had thought as an adult was central to me as a child. It is playing out strongly again in the time of cholera.  What people say they remember, or believe they can pick up from the contemporary and immediately succeeding historical documents turns out to have very different centers than we imagine. Millions of people died.  The dead fell like flies on my way to school.  But we hardly noticed, because we were tougher then and we just pressed on.  Nobody closed so much as hot dog stand over it. Why my old Dad would be ashamed at what we're doing now.