History

I always enjoyed my history lessons though not necessarily my history teacher. Well, my history teacher was a whole story by itself and in a million ways is a nightmare (perhaps in the scale of WW2 in the terms of my personal history). The way she pronounced famous names like Napoleon Bonaparte still leaves me shuddering in my blanket. However, that is a tale for some other day.

A lot of people find history boring and dare I say it – USELESS! Ok. I’m not one of these people. History for me is full of color (ok...grey is still a color nonetheless). I still remember the INVINCIBLE ARSENAL lose for the first time after going on a 49 match unbeaten run or the first time I first flicked through the pages of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Ok..ok…granted that is not important history to most of us but it is important to me personally. So, in that perspective history isn’t too boring.

And is history useless? It apparently is if you never learn or get inspiration from them. Perhaps our Angkasawan derived his inspiration from Neil Armstrong? Or perhaps our A1 driver, Alex Yoong got his inspiration from Prost or Schumi. Or perhaps I got my inspiration from Lord Denning (probably not!)? And haven’t we learnt from the follies of old? We learn from Hitler that from extremism there can be only a great potential for tragedy and disaster. We have also learned from people like Lincoln that in the face of great adversity there is still a way to great achievements.

But, perhaps what the Malaysian public wants to know is how is it that we never learned from the story of the Titanic? She was unspoiled by the seas, a virgin in that regard and yet the seas claimed her and ravaged her and left her sunk in the deep abyss of his wet belly. We all know of this sad story and yet even now we have not learned from it. If we had, probably something more could have been done to ensure the safety of the passengers of the ferry that was set ablaze only recently. Why was the crew not prepared for a disaster? Why was the ferry still in commission when it did not have a permit? History may be useless but if we had only learnt about the story of the Titanic maybe the loved ones of the deceased of this tragedy will not have so many “why” to ask. Why wasn’t there enough life jackets? Why did these innocent tourists have to die?

My answer?

->Because we find history BORING