Learning from history

Editor,

First, a confession: I seldom read the “Remember When?” column in the Ledger. But something compelled me to read it last week when Miriah Kardelis reviewed what life was like here 80 years ago, just one month after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

Teachers and parents would be well advised to start reading this column to their students and children, as history is our best lesson on what can come in the future. The past couple generations have little or no concept of what it could be like to once again deal with threats of war on our own soil. Some of the quotes that Miriah pulled from the Sanders County Ledger on January 7, 1942:

“Don’t sit home by the fire and say, ‘why don’t they do this and why don’t they do that?’ Do your bit at home and the boys at the front and in the camps will do theirs.”

“No large city paper now publishes weather reports and radios no longer mention the weather.” The reason for this would make a fascinating history lesson all by itself.

“There will come sorrows and headaches as our young men go and maybe heartbreaks as they return no more.... Every day brings new opportunities to serve. To serve is to live.”

And finally, the mentioning of a survey to see how well Montana could handle an anticipated influx of evacuees from the Pacific coast.

These were real and serious issues, which many older Montanans still vividly remember. Yet our younger generations, for the most part, blissfully coast through life in America, never realizing what true hunger and true national emergency can mean. They need to be taught history. A quote often attributed to Winston Churchill says it all: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Jan Manning,

Trout Creek