leftovers: when does the past become the past?

In this post, I wrote about how a history museum can sometimes bring a false sense of closure to an ongoing problem. The feeling grew out of my trip to Hiroshima in 2008.

I think I walked into the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum a decade ago very well prepared to feel the drawback and understand what it was telling me. This is because I studied Hiroshima in school. Studying World War II was an experience that was completely different for me than it was for any of my classmates. As a result, I’d always thought I took away different lessons from class than was intended in the local curriculum.

I realized at a young age, for example, that no matter what I did with my life, there would always be the possibility that some unstoppable force like the US government could step in and take anything away from me at any time – my home, my health, my life. This kind of loss, I knew, could happen without warning, and perhaps it was this kind of understanding I took away from my high school days that prepared me to walk among the many exhibits at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and feel something I suspect was not originally intended when the museum was put together.