Old, old soldiers....living in three centuries

In addition to my duties having founded New Hope Community Health, I'm honored to also teach a high school class on international history at the Vineyard Christian Home School Co op. Each Tuesday and Thursday I meet with twelve 11th graders and we read about history. To add a different flavor to the study of it, we began in the current times and worked our way backwards.

Thus far into the semester we now find ourselves at The First World War - looking at the incredible sacrifice that the European nations (and later, America) provided through losing the flowering youth of that generation.

The entire historical period from President William McKinley's assasination, through TR's Presidency and on into President Wilson's "Peace" Presidency is incredible. The class' text book is a brief book entitled "The Yanks are Coming".

While searching You Tube for footage of the terrible days directly after McKinley's assasination, I began to view rare footage of those times - through the early 'teens of the last century. Viewing Thomas Edison's black and white "shorts" from those times can tend to make us think that people from that time period were awkward moving, voiceless shadows of what we mostly tend to remember, when we think of them: silent movies and silent movie stars.

Then, it hits you. These were people who lived, worked and breathed and were married and had hopes and carried children to term as mothers...people who lived then...and are mostly gone today.

Mostly.

Because some still remain....men who have lived in three centuries ( the 19th, 20th and 21st Centuries) I next stumbled across a Daily Mail article from this past month's somber celebration in Europe of Armistice Day (the day WWI ended in 1918). The figure of one "last soldier" weeping over his lost friends from 90 years ago was so touching.

My 11th grade home-schoolers held in their hands today a WWI helmet that was given to me by my dad in 1971. It has the name of the soldier who wore it, his unit and his fort. To connect the dots of just how real the Dough Boys' lives (and deaths) were, these American students are now searching out what happened to him and his unit.

As I assigned this project, I realized that these American High School students, too, stand the chance of living in their own three centuries, like the soldiers mentioned in the article...

And life today IS every bit as real as it WILL BE 90 years from now...and as it WAS 90 years ago.

Food for thought.

Den