The Importance of Touching the Past

 

As all good Texans do I made a pilgrimage to the Alamo. I touched the bullet scarred walls. I walked the ground. Part of the old fort was across the street and stretched across a substantial area of downtown San Antonio. As a younger man I took my boys to San Jacinto, arguably one of the key battle grounds of the 19th century and walked the fields where the outnumbered Texans in their rage and fury thundered down on the surprised Mexican Army and destroyed it. I marveled at the courage it must have taken to cross that field knowing the army across the way was twice your army's size. And while they made that charge the immortal "Yellow Rose of Texas," a mulatto slave girl distracted Santa Anna and earned herself the title place in the battle hymn of Texas.

Then there was the Battleship Texas, a veteran of WWI and WWII, bombarding the landing grounds from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It's still maintained as a sacred site to Texans. I roamed the decks upper and lower as a kid (I was there twice). I walked the battlefields at Vicksburg, Valley Forge and the dog run cabin of Cynthia Ann Parker who was abducted by Comanches and became the mother of the War Chief Quanah Parker.

And every time I visit an historic place like that, I have to touch something that was there. In Washington DC, I did a rubbing of the name of a neighbor kid I knew that died in Vietnam and had his name inscribed there. And there was there in DC at the Museum of Natural History the very skeleton of a T-Rex that I had seen so many times in the books on dinosaurs that I poured over when I was 6 and had just learned to say paleontologist correctly and thought I wanted to be one.

When I see a generation coming up that has no reverence for the past it makes me sad. For those who forget the past, who have no respect for the lessons learned by our ancestors, are doomed to make far worse mistakes in the future.

Thank God not all young people have forgot. Some have learned. Their parents taught them and like my wife and I did we hauled our kids every Saturday afternoon to every museum, state park, stopped for every historical marker and landmark whether historical or natural within 150 miles of our home. We taught those kids to wonder. To experience that sense of touching the past, of reverence for the lives that made our freedom and prosperity possible.

God will not allow those kind of people to be lost in the quagmire created by the totalitarian rulers who want to erase everything worthwhile, everything heroic, every trace of goodness we've learned through hard endeavor.Those people seek a corruptible crown and by God we who each day continue to learn from the past - we shall oppose them!

© 2021 by Tom King