Gratitude and Joy: History and Scottish Christmas Album

Gratitude and Joy: Day 7

I am grateful for:

History
I personally find history fascinating and entertaining, but what I'm grateful for is our access to it. I've been thinking about two different quotations lately: "Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it" (Winston Churchill, and literally every other person interested in history ever, probably) and "May you live in an interesting age" (probably not an ancient Chinese curse). We certainly seem to be living in an interesting age, and one that is marking the rapid and increasing loss of our remaining elders who have meaningful memories of the greatest upheaval in the western world in the 20th century. A human being in their late teens at the end of World War II is, if still living, near ninety now. Our access to the terror, the horror, and the lessons of WWII, the Holocaust, and their fallout is increasingly becoming limited to what history has left for us. Our ability to generate and record new primary materials about the events that still ripple through our world in the form of ideologies, borders, and still simmering disputes is passing away. In another decade, it will be fully gone. This is the nature of life, of time. Those who remember will always pass away. Thus it is forever incumbent upon us to value our access to the truth and to support continuing efforts to record history as truthfully as we can. Of course historical accounts are always biased, but I am grateful to live in a time and a place where it is usually easy enough to identify those biases and avoid material that contains outright lies. May we remember that this is by no means guaranteed and fight for this kind of freedom to continue to be the case. 


I feel joyful listening to:

A Scottish Christmas
My grandparents gave me this Christmas album some twenty years ago, and it has remained one of my absolute favorites since then. I have always felt a strong affinity for my Scottish ancestry, and I'm one of those people who feels that sharp combination of joy and pride that almost turns into weeping at the sound of the bagpipes. If you are one of those folks who finds them screechy, I don't want to hear about it, but I will warn you that you aren't going to like this, one of my favorite pieces on the album.