As frail humans, only possessing a 100 year or so lifespan, it’s so hard to remember things that happened outside of everybody’s living memory.
That’s that there’s lots of things that are happening nowadays that seem so new – yet they’ve been done before.
For example, the Euro – an international currency that works as legal tender all across Europe. That’s a brand-new thing that hasn’t happened before, right?
Not exactly. In 1865, the Latin Monetary Union was formed. It standardized currency in most of Europe – with the big exceptions of the United Kingdom, Portugal, Germany, Scandinavia and the Netherlands – so that somebody could spend one currency in a different country.
Why don’t we remember this? Because most of us aren’t historians, we rely on the living memory of ourselves and others.
Now, we’re getting to the point where the First and Second World Wars are no longer in living memory. We’re almost at the point where we’ve forgotten the horrors of war, like those around the First World War forgot the worldwide Napoleonic Wars in the beginning of the 1800s and the worldwide Seven Years War in the middle of the 1700s.
We’re at the point of the cycle again where the people at large have forgotten the horrors of war, letting the stupid politicians bring us straight in another one.
That’s why Remembrance Day is so important. To break the cycle of worldwide war, we have to remember how horrible it is. If we don’t, the cost could be another war.
So never forget, no matter how far away war seems.
