America is a very forgetful nation. Experiences undergone and lessons learned often escape our hazy collective memory. Stuyvesant, a passable microcosm for the nation, is also inclined to disregard past events in favor of the latest trends.
Our neglectful nature is most evident in the capriciousness of contemporary culture. Remember Sanjaya Malakar, Livestrong wristbands or Razor scooters?
People no longer give a thought to the mobilization of students the well-intentioned but misguided Hiro and Chase called for just a few months ago. Their Web site, stuywatch.com, has died a very quick death.
Also forgotten is one of the objects of their ire—that dreaded scanning system. But swiping those ID cards (currently orange; who knows what color they will be next year?) to go outside for lunch seems so natural and inoffensive now.
The gradual succession of online social networks—from Xanga to MySpace to Sconex to Facebook to some yet uncreated site that will undoubtedly be the rage tomorrow—is an example of the immediacy in which students live. Vogues subside. But always there will be something new to take the place of a trend that has run its course.
Events as earth-shattering as deaths pale as time passes and induces amnesia. All the sadness we felt at the loss of April, Kevin and, more recently, Gabriel and Eugene, are now but faint shadows of former overwhelming emotions. We, with the exclusion of close friends, may not think about them except on the rare occasion we walk along that first floor corridor. We glance at the glassed memorial for April and Kevin there and keep walking forward.
Few Texans remember the Alamo. December 7 is not a day that lives in infamy. “Never forget 9/11!” was quickly forgotten when Stuyvesant did not hold a moment of silence on the fifth anniversary of the attacks. Even present events recede from our awareness. At times, many of us fail to recall that America is in the midst of a war.
If the retentive abilities of this nation and this school are not enough to preserve such monumental occurrences, it is almost a certainty that we, our friends, our grade and perhaps our entire generation will soon be forgotten in the annals of history.
Those glass cases that line the walls of Stuyvesant, time capsules both chronicling the years of the school and housing pieces of world history, are our opportunity for immortality. The class of 2008 may be gone in a few short months, but we will live on in the miscellanea we choose to represent us in our display.
With the memory of the world already as fallible as it is, we must not give it yet another excuse to disregard us. We cannot afford to go the way of the graduating classes from 1999 to 2006, which all left their cases empty. Our time here must not become just one more faded fad—as forgotten as those Furbies trashed somewhere in the depths of our closets.
