Memories Light the Corners of Your Mind
My mother would often tell me stories of living an unhappy youth. In Finland, her father, a strict disciplinarian and absolute authoritarian belonged to a fundamentalist Lutheran sect called the “Kortillut”. This faction wore dark, black traditionalist clothing, with the exception of white shirts for males. Females were required to wear a black, button-down, long-sleeved, ankle-length dress. Entertainment of any sort was strictly prohibited and assigned work for each child on their meager farm was of the utmost importance and rigidly audited. There were specific, stringent behavioral demands, and any dissension or dispute was met with swift, physical retribution. Children were as much for work as they were for the furtherance of namesake and religion.
She also told me of a few happier moments. She had hidden colorful clothing, with an abundance of red coloring, inside the carved-out trunk of a large Berlin Poplar tree. Under the cover of darkness, she would sneak into the forest and change into these clothes, and race to town for a teen dance. Unable to stay late, she would race back to the tree, return into her drab traditional garb, and sprint back home. She spent the evening in dreams of a swaying dance and frolicking in fearless freedom.
My mother said that my grandfather, on his death bed, solicited forgiveness for his severe and overly-stern manner during her childhood and that of her many siblings. She forgave him, but never forgot him – he was, after all, her father.
A few years before her death, I asked my mother how she and my father had met – he had passed away many years earlier. The question was too late. Her response was, “I don’t remember”. Her memory was beginning to fade. If you have elderly parents or grandparents, and you want to chronicle your own history, don’t let this happen to you.
Memories are, after all, your veritable history. Recollections are the one and only thing everyone gets to keep. Unless an early illness sets in, it is the one and the only thing that is kept entirely through one’s entire lifetime and the exclusive undeniable, “until death do you part”. Whether you have done a lot or very little, it’s only memories that persist. When one is older, the memory bank is assuredly much more crammed – flowing with the good, the bad, and the indifferent.
The lack of memories is another reason it is easier to recruit youth to the illusionist circus of climate change. The younger generations have not experienced the diversity of weather, the catastrophic storms of the past, and the devastation of floods, droughts, and fires long before there was the political invention called global warming which became climate change, which morphed into climate emergency and now, persuasively intensified to the climate crisis.
The youth will not remember how global cooling was the activist’s scientific consensus of the 1970s and the reason older activists, like fascists, endeavor to destroy any evidence or documentation of that theory. The older generation will remember being taught honestly about the Medieval Warm Period when the temperatures between 950 AD and 1250 AD were much warmer than today – a period long before the discovery and use of fossil fuels. This is an epoch being purposely dissolved by activists and instructors because it factually opposes their false politicized narrative.
It is much easier to train youth into being emotional rather than factual - to instill feel-good sentiment rather than a do-right perspective. With the young, it is easier to use the word “unprecedented” – in youth everything can be exceptional or extraordinary when the past is blank or deceptively made to appear that way and when one is so susceptible and naive to the propagandist storyline. The adjectives historical, record-setting and biblical are used in the exact same way.
The other thing with youthful memory is that they were too young, certainly in many cases, to have heard the predictions and prophecies made by the climate alarmists. All of those forecasts that never, ever came true, and I do mean all. In the eyes of the climate activist, they see the opportunity in youth, while the elderly begin to disappear. As the writer, Sara Zarr once said, “When the remembering was done, the forgetting could begin.”