Broken Memory

"The media and the schools don't do much to help us integrate reality and memory. Every fact appears divorced from the rest, divorced from its own past and the past of every other fact. Consumer culture, a culture of disconnectedness, trains us to believe that things just happen. Incapable of recalling its origins, the present paints the future as a repetition of itself; tomorrow is just another name for today. The unequal organization of the world, which beggars the human condition, is part of eternity, and injustice is a fact of life we have no choice but to accept.
Does history repeat itself? Or are its repetitions only penance for those whoe are incapable of listening to it? No history is mute. No matter how much they burn it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth. Depsite deafness and ignorance, the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is. The right to remember does not figure among the rights consecrated by the United Nations, but now more than ever we must insist on it and act on it. Not to repeat the past, but to keep it from being repeated. Not to make us ventriloquists for the dead but to allow us to speak with voices that are not condemned to echo perpetually with stupidity and misfortune. When it's truly alive, memory doesn't contemplate history, it invites us to make it. More than in museums, where its poor old soul gets bored, memory is in the air we breathe, and from the air, it breathes us."

-Eduardo Galeano from his book, Upside Down