It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.
Those are the opening lines of Charles Dickens’ 1859 novel A Tale Of Two Cities.
The novel covers a tumultuous period — the French Revolution. It was an era that preceded Dickens. But it was also one he encapsulated quite well.
Dickens was a master at finding the dramatic tension in any setting. He could extract a story from a loud moment, or even a quiet one. After all, he managed to turn the customary stillness of Christmas Eve into a page-turner.
But perhaps Dickens’ greatest skill was his most simplistic one — he wasn’t afraid to document the moment.
We tend to look at history through documentation.
This could be cave paintings, ancient tablets with hieroglyphics or crumbling Roman columns.
Recently, that documentation has been easier to access. Johannes Gutenberg changed the world with the invention of the printing press in the 1400s. Suddenly, works of communication could be mass published, instead of hand-written.
The treasure-trove of historical documentation has increased over the past 500 years. In fact, even Dickens would owe a modicum of gratitude to Gutenberg. Without his invention, there’s no way he would have been able to put out long-form content, let alone become one of the most widely-acclaimed writers of all time.
Yet, for all the documentation of recent history we can get our hands on, there is something missing — the perspectives of those in the fray.
We might watch musicals derived from the letters of Alexander Hamilton. We might learn the words to the Gettysburg Address. But those works come from the perspectives of the acclaimed. We know far less about how it felt, viscerally, as the American colonies became a nation. Or what it was like seeing that same nation plunge into a bloody Civil War.
The people on the ground in those eras surely felt the winds of transformation. But, by and large, they didn’t share their in-the-moment thoughts.
Some of that has changed in the last century. Anne Frank’s diary gave the world a heartbreaking inside view to the atrocities of the Holocaust. And the growth of home video equipment made it easier to record our reactions to transformative moments.
But we’ve only seen real progress on this frontier in the last 20 years.
In early 2011, a series of uprisings across the Arabic region caught the world’s attention. In countries from Morocco to Egypt and Yemen to Syria, people took to the streets to oppose authoritarian regimes. The movement would come to be known as the Arab Spring.
This was a fascinating development on its own. But it was even more intriguing given the way the world found out about the Arab Spring.
In many countries across the region, protesters shared their thoughts, ideals and perspectives on social media. Some shared video clips on YouTube. And as news networks started broadcasting images from the scene, the world gained a 360 degree view of what was happening.
Never before had we been able to document history in real time quite like this. Sure, media outlets have long been able to gather the facts of big moments. But they haven’t been able to fully capture the essence of those living the change.
That perspective is not theirs to document. For they are reporters and producers on assignment. They are experiencing the events from a degree of separation.
No, it’s up to those in the fight to document their experiences. In 2011, they did.
But the story doesn’t have to end there.
Sometimes I wish I could travel back to 1999.
I was a shy, submissive child back then. Far from the strong-willed, independent adult I am today.
I didn’t have a cell phone yet. Our family had just gotten DSL Internet. And I could count on one hand the number of times I’d traveled more than 500 miles from home.
Yet, life seemed simpler in 1999. People were trusting and approachable. The United States government was running a surplus. There were relatively few armed conflicts globally and the developed world seemed to be in harmony.
All of that would soon be shattered.
In less than two decades, the world has been shaken to its core by three major events. The first event was the September 11th terror attacks in 2001 — which jolted the United States and left aftershocks around the globe. The second event was the 2008 financial crisis — which disrupted economies on multiple continents. And the third event has been the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.
As I write this, the pandemic has sickened more than 400,000 people worldwide, and killed roughly 18,000 of them. Close to 3 billion people have been officially ordered to stay in their homes — about 500 million of them in Europe and the United States.
These are frightening times, filled with anxious uncertainty. Across the globe, people are being isolated to slow the spread of the virus. Menial activities like shopping for groceries or walking the dog are now fraught with lethal risk. And millions of people have lost their jobs as businesses shut down.
It is a difficult era to be experiencing. But experiencing it we are.
Someday, this time of strife will end. The stringent rules and restrictions will be relaxed, and society will get back to some semblance of normalcy.
We will continue to carry the emotional scars of the pandemic — just as we still carry the scars of the 2008 Financial Crisis and of 9/11.
But those feelings will get buried under the rush of the moment. Soon enough, they will be all but forgotten.
Future generations will lose connection with the shared experience under the COVID-19 pandemic. News reports and statistics will only say so much.
Look at what we know about the last global pandemic of this scale — the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918. More than a century of distance means that there aren’t people around with firsthand accounts of that experience. Much of what we know comes from newspaper clippings and photographs. And that means there’s a whole lot we don’t know as we navigate these rough seas.
This is tragic.
We should be taking the time to document our experiences, even during trying times. Especially during trying times.
There are not many other generations that have experienced what many of us have — three global security, financial and health crises in a 20 year span. What we’ve experienced firsthand is worth sharing.
I’ve long committed to share my experiences right here on Words of the West. I will continue to do so. And I’m keeping a daily diary of my time under de facto quarantine, which I hope to share with the world at some point.
Yet, I hope I’m not the only one.
After all, our excuses have evaporated. Technology makes it easier than ever to share our firsthand accounts. But only if we commit to action.
So, we move through life’s challenges and triumphs, let’s commit ourselves to being more than mere passengers.
Don’t just witness history. Document it.