I am told over in the USA some States are into their season of storms and with the usual trained expectations of the populace people are preparing. Although most people will just put up the shutters and tidy the garden afterwards, around the world and through history people have faced storm, flood, eruption and plague and tried to piece their lives together afterwards.
This year the last of the living British soldiers from World War One died. Throughout my life I have always wondered why we have no commemoration to the dead from the Napoleonic Era, a time when England lost one half of its male population over a decade or so. A far larger percent than was lost in World War One though not as large a number. But had we remembered maybe other wars would not have happened.
We are very good at preparing for what we know but we often forget from one generation to the next, we are not as good at remembrance as we should be because we always think we have got it under better control. That past generations were more ‘backward’ than we.
The real problem for people is that experience becomes a story, and a story becomes an embellished tale and before you know it floods are things we tell our children about as part of a myth. We do not recall the heartache of Pompeii or the horror of earthquakes in China three thousand years ago. We have no memorials to the names of the dead.
It is not very intelligent to only remember what we have lived through.