A good many historians say that most of the world, and especially Americans, move through history suffering from a case of "historical amnesia." People too easily forget the last disaster and lose track of the last atrocity. But we do not forget because of some bout of amnesia-because of some blow to the head or because of too much alcohol. Something deeper and more radical eats away at us. In a sense, we have been programmed to experience "amnesia." Despite the insistence from Freud that the pleasure principle drives people's behavior, everything around us encourages turning aside from tragedy to just have a good time.
Some critics argue, Well, the numbers are just too overwhelming, the scale just too huge, for anyone to even begin to feel the pain and shock of death. Forty thousand die in a mudslide in Central America, another sixty thousand in a Tsunami in Indonesia, perhaps one million or more in Darfur, and tens of millions of human beings from AIDS worldwide. I say the numbers matter little. Something more basic shapes today's attitude toward such a ghostly way of dying. Beneath those euphemisms of death lies a grim reality; but to really see it, we first have to hold in our minds the concept of the human being as something vital and crucial. Human beings first have to come fully alive for us, before we can consider them dead. (In order to truly fall asleep, we must first come fully awake.) And, for a great many people, living seems just too confusing, too remote, or, worse yet, too difficult. The "isness" of being eludes us. A life is easy to come by, but living seems to remain just out of reach. We owe this strange state of affairs to a legacy we inherited from the nineteenth century.
-Sanders
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