Editorial: The trail left behind

February 7, 2007

History is told through the legacy left behind by each culture we remember. Rome contributed countless advances and memories to our cultural awareness, from technological advances to art, as did Greece. The British and French Middle Ages gave us a rich cultural legacy, from Arthur to Robin Hood, from religious dissent to the beginnings of revolution. The Enlightenment and Renaissance eras produced modern political thought and drama, from Shakespeare to Franklin. America’s formation during this period began begging the question, then, of what impact this newborn of a country would have in Western civilization’s cultural legacy.

Whether we meant to or not, the question quickly shifted from how America will be remembered by the world into how will each generation be remembered by tomorrow’s America. This is not to say that we are not concerned with our position in the global political and cultural theater; of course we are, and we recognize that our cultural innovations spread across Europe and through Asia. (One anecdote says that a group of American students visited a pub in Ireland, deep in the countryside, away from Dublin, so that they might enjoy a totally un-American experience. Imagine their chagrin when they walked into the pub to see Hawaii Five-O playing on the barroom TV.) Whatever its reason, one must wonder what trail our generation leaves behind for our descendants to follow, what it is we leave in our wake to be remembered by.

There have been beat poets that protested wars, musicians invented genres of music we now take for granted (e.g., jazz and rock) and revolutionaries who, from within our country, changed the course of worldwide thought. Do we have in our midst such revolutionaries? Can our generation hope to produce an Allen Ginsberg, a Benjamin Franklin or a Shakespeare? How will we be remembered? Through our literature? There are no more literary celebrities like Mark Twain; there is no writer that has quite the ability to impact our culture in the way that Twain did. Our popular music is wanting; who will remember any of the groups active today outside of this decade, let alone this era?

The simple answer is that we do not know who will remember what we leave behind. Our culture will keep hurtling onwards—or downward, depending on who you talk to—and history will dictate who our defining cultural figures are. Hope, then, that we might eventually be remembered as the generation that brought peace to a world torn apart by war—a legacy that would rival that of Rome’s.