The Past, The Present, and The Generation That Sees Both

Dano Vukicevich

When you see an abandoned house what do you think about? When you see a rusted nail, do you feel anything besides the instinct to avoid the sharp end of it? Even if you have never been intrigued with the past or you never stopped doodling during history class, you have to admit that the past intersects our present quite often.

“Those were different times. Don’t worry about the past. That was a long time ago, things are different now.”

Everyone has heard some version of someone telling you to not get lost in the past, and to live in the present. I couldn’t agree more, but unfortunately ignorance towards history’s lessons often makes the present exceedingly difficult to live in.

I see the past in the tragic things happening around us, but I also see the past in the good events that are less frequently reported on, and I even see the past in the mundane parts of life that rarely even catch our peripheral vision. Something that happened before my time made it possible for me to walk down this paved road, see these houses, and pick up that newspaper. Someone drew up this alphabet for me to learn to read with, and I have learned a lot from those letters. The past teaches many lessons for anyone willing to listen. When I see an abandoned building, I ask why? When I know why this old pump house has been left to rot in an open field, I ask how?

When I sat shotgun on the drive south on I-25 to Trinidad, Colorado, I did not know much about the Ludlow Massacre. Colorado National Guardsman fired into and burnt the camp of striking coal miners in 1914, who were only asking for a more decent wage and way of life. While thumbing through pages in a historical museum in Trinidad, the reality of the massacre began to take hold. The awful truth of what happened in a small mining community in southern Colorado could be seen clearly in those pages, and I was frustrated with my own lack of knowledge about this tragedy.

The book I was reading might as well of had cobwebs on the spine and only readable after one blew off an inch of dust from its cover, because it was so far out of reach from my personal library of historical knowledge.

I have been to the beaches of Normandy, I have stared into the crematories of Dachau, and I have spat at the Eagle’s Nest in Berchtesgaden. I am no stranger to sobering circumstances. But the feeling that followed me from Trinidad to the campsite in Ludlow, from Colorado to where I sit now, was something different. It was a part of history ignored and most importantly, ignored by me.

I stood in that abandoned pump house, on a pile of broken support beams and rusted nails, and took a picture. I took a picture of the death pit where women and children suffocated on the fumes of greed. After walking around two cemeteries for hours, I took a picture of the Costa family’s tombstone. It was quiet in all these places. Invisible and unheard by the vast majority of our generation.

So I took these pictures. I tried to make them appealing to the eye. Tried to provoke emotion with my lenses, because I certainly didn’t take them for myself. There is a wealth of information from major events in history, and very little from stories like Ludlow. I took this picture for you.

Our generation is the first of its kind. We have a surplus of technology and information at our disposal. We are in an unique position to spread this information, and most productively, to act with this information. Workers today still struggle against their masters. History continuously repeats itself in one form or another, and we now have the capabilities to learn from that history, and to work together with that information to improve our lives and the lives of our friends.

I don’t want your money, nor do I want your acknowledgement. I only ask for your ear. For a moment to listen to the stories of the past, and understand how they have affected the world we live in. How one moment in history can determine who receives what end of the stick. There are many other stories like Ludlow, and they are often only a few short clicks on the mouse away. What can we learn from Ludlow? Why is this story not being taught directly to us? How many other Ludlows are out there, and what can we do to memorialize those in the past appropriately?

At first, all I was after was to create art from the past. But I realize now that this isn’t art at all. It is an invitation. Our generation is enormous, it is intelligent, and it is resourceful. We have all the tools to make a better world.

History has paved the road we are walking on, and we must all choose the best direction to walk on it. We have seen what can happen when the past is ignored and mistakes are repeated. We can be the generation that turns around and takes a step the other way.

Remember Ludlow, research more Ludlows, and think about what possibilities lie in the hands of our generation. Share this knowledge with those close to you, share it with strangers, and approach these lost stories with questions about our present.

History never stops teaching, and I’m proud to say that I am part of the generation that can learn the most from it. The past deserves our attention, and we are connected with it more than we know, so lets embrace it and move in the right direction. We will evolve, we will progress, and we will show history what generation marked the turning point.

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Dano Vukicevich is photo-journalist and a graduate of Colorado State University in Ft. Collins. He is from Northern California and currently teaches English in South Korea.

For further information regarding the Ludlow Massacre, see the four-part series from the World Socialist Web Site: http://bit.ly/KZskgl