“The sickness of silence.”

A letter to future historians.

As it once appeared to be. Joseph Moxon, 1681. (Cornell University Library/ Wikimedia Commons.)

BERKELEY, 7 MARCH 2024—I write this letter so that you, who will look back on our time as professionals trained in the craft of recording history, will see it in the whole for all that it is, nothing missed. We who are alive now do not have the vision I urge you to bring to our present and what will be for you your past.

Ours is a time of catastrophe, of savagery in the name of righteousness, a time of commonly shared depravity, of defeats for the human cause, of civilizational collapse. But this larger import of the events to which I refer—apartheid Israel’s condemnable aggression against the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank, the profligate wastage of human lives in America’s proxy war with Russia in Ukraine—is simply too large for most of us to manage. It is as if we sit too close to a movie screen properly to see the picture. You must do better than we in this. You must master the vision that eludes us and write the true, whole picture into history. 

Many important events are hidden from us. They are often written out of the record at least in part and sometimes altogether as if they never occurred. In addressing you I mean to do what small thing one can do to make sure the truth of our time is properly recorded. To know that the histories you will write will comprise some or all of what power has sought to obliterate can be a kind of redemption, a source of confidence in humanity’s capacity for goodness. 

Justice is not retroactive: The wrongs we witness daily cannot be taken back or reversed, I mean to say, just as a mother and child wantonly murdered with an Israeli sniper’s bullet in Gaza cannot be brought back to life. But we can honor all such victims of injustice if we write their stories truly, as you are in a position to do. Their sufferings and their deaths will not, in this way, be altogether in vain. 

It is by way of the historical record, the recording of history, of “what happened,” that the lies proliferating all around us as I write this letter can be exposed and, at least in the way our story is told, transcended. 

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