I don’t know what it is about today that feels a bit off to me. Maybe it’s the media culture, or perhaps it’s the idea of the temporary: Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. I like these things for their ability to connect and spread art, but it’s harder for me to become an addict. Kim Kardashian and Kayne West are far from my radar just because they are. There are things of today that I love but more things today that I only give a shrug to. Isn’t that strange?

No, not really.

One of the biggest shames in our education system is the way we teach history. How did you learn? Consider the days of history class you remember compared to the many days you’ve likely forgotten. What do we remember? Things like field trips and activities, classroom visitors and days of cooking historical foods (assuming you were able to have any of those) are what remains in us. Memories, relationships, using our hands. How we teach it today is deplorable. Powerpoint screens and notebooks, tests and essays, cannot tell us about human life.

Science and math are pushed by politicians and educators as being the fields we should report. They represent the future. For a society to progress we need technology and discovery.

LIES.

This is the truth: I’ve found myself in the past. And no, I’m not alone on that. More people than you can think of feel more at home watching silent films than modern blockbusters, spend Friday nights swing dancing rather than at raves. They go out of the way to be in the old and avoid the new. They stand at historical sites at just the correct angle so as to hide the modern world that has grown around it.

The teaching of history matters because it is so much more than dates, times, facts, borders, etc. It’s a different way of living. Here’s the thing: people are people regardless of the time period. They laugh, cry, dream, love, feel anger, yell, look up to the stars and dream and create with their hands.

If people like Ted Cruz are going to speak about individual freedom and liberty, then we have to imagine the possibilities of freedom in identity. Imagine a society where we didn’t feel bound to be like everyone else, where I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about dragging a friend to a local film festival on the golden age of cinema and they didn’t feel bad for taking me to see Transformers 14.

I bring this up because despite the fact that we as a society still have many problems to solve in regards to immigrants, there is no denial they’ve made our society better. American culture has formed itself based on what people had to bring and how they smashed it together with something else. While there’s truth to the fact the United States is one thing because of its military power, it’s a whole other thing because of the incredible culture it provides. We’re the dominant culture in the world with the arts we produce.

But imagine a country where we can look at our culture during a decade and weed out the worst parts of it and hold onto the greatest. What if, like our immigrants, we could smash the new and the old together and create a totally new way of understanding: a totally new American identity that we created from ourselves? What if other free countries could find the best parts of themselves and form an incredible piece of art?

Hostility comes into this because - in my own view - we never learned to look at history the way we should see it: a different way of living. Knowledge of the past is power because it opens the gate to the future. Past mistakes make clear paths going forward.

If you’re needing a physical example of the past and present colliding, maybe these examples can help you. Out of Eastern Europe came a bizarre and unexpected genre of music. People with a love for the past smashed those things with the future. So we get things like the ever growing music of Electro Swing, where the Jazz Age hits the Rave Age:

Or the Broadway smash hit "Hamilton," where they took Revolutionary War politics and told it through hip-hop, casting the roles of the Founding Fathers as African-American and Latino actors. The creator says, “this is the story of America then, told by America now."

Yet another amazing example: a bunch of people from France who had such a passion for the era of Silent Movies, they decided to create one their own using modern technology to tell about a time long past: also, it made it’s budget back six times over and won the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture of the Year.

And of course, who could forget our friends at Postmodern Jukebox?

Why does this matter?

If we as a society continued looking forward, these are things we never would have considered making. Art is not creation, art is inspiration. How many people will experience this music, see this musical or watch this film (or many other things like it) and become artists themselves? In what could have been just a textbook, these people are adapting history to fit our needs: adding the bass drum to jazz, for example, because it helps us better understand the kinds of lives people lived. Interpretation changes. Feelings don’t.

I’m not suggesting that you go out and buy ten history books to find inspiration, as dry reading of history like that doesn’t work for all like dry reading of science doesn’t work for myself. My suggestion is opening your mind the world we’ve left behind and to see those that identify in those eras: those girls who wear polka-dot dresses and boys who dress like greasers, those who participate in Civil War re-enactments and paint pioneer days have made those days a part of their identity and way of seeing the world.