When we heard about the Tucson shootings, we all knew they were important; some of us just weren’t sure why. So for the past two weeks we’ve been subjected to exhausting analysis.
Politicians and media figures have argued endlessly, trying to fit acts of senseless violence into some broad historical narrative, to figure out what they mean to the country and to our future.
It’s something we do naturally. Anxious to understand our own place in the universe, we look for significance in the events we live through. If our lifetimes are important, we must be too.
As with so many human tendencies, our need for historical validation has been turned into a powerful tool to sell us things. Each day we see a new series of revolutions in all sorts of historically not-so-important industries.
Apple makes history every 15 days or so with portable YouTube players.
In sports, it’s not enough to enjoy a great performance by great athletes. We’ve created a vast, tangled history for professional sports, in which every play is a milestone.
Either way, if we tune out we miss history.
And in politics, we stretch mightily to find meaning in senselessness, unwilling to accept that something terrible, or wonderful, might happen without massive historical implications.
But it turns out, no matter how hard we look for history-making events, we’re just not very good at recognizing them.
This is due, at least in part, to the fact that truly world-changing events are few and far between. History repeats itself precisely because we so rarely change.
There are big events, maybe even big people, in the grand scheme of things. But I won’t pretend to know what or who they are.
History is valuable because it is not immediate. You can’t see the scope of New York City from 14th Street and Broadway — you have to get off the island to see its size.
That’s what history is — more than looking back, it’s climbing out, removing ourselves from the story so we can see it.
But we are the best judges of that meaning which stems from us. People matter if they matter to us. Events matter if they impact our lives.
A fundamental truth of many great religions is that the things we do here matter, not for their places in fifth-grade history texts, but for what they mean to us, and for how they change our lives.
That’s a truth we sometimes forget, and in doing so, we struggle to identify the meaning behind events like those in Tucson.
Grand, sweeping narratives can be a lot of fun. But they’re not the only standard of significance. A life well-lived is an end in itself, and our obsession with long timelines can distract us from that.
Politics are unlikely to change, but when good people die, it always matters.
Reach John at john.a.gaylord@asu.edu
