The past is never dead. It’s not even past. — William Faulkner
BEING AN AMATEUR STUDENT OF HISTORY, it strikes me sometimes how much our perception of time is an elastic and uncertain thing.

America, ever in love with the new, habitually discards anything with the slightest mustiness of age.

There was a time not that long ago when day could hardly break without being officially validated and described by longtime CBS News anchor and reporter Walter Cronkite, a man anyone much younger than me probably doesn’t even know about.

In a dynamic place like America, it is easy to forget that the effects of history linger, whether we recognize them or not.

My mother’s father was named Sterling Truitt. When I was a child I asked him what he thought of world events. When he was born, his house did not have electric lighting. His deprivation was not from poverty or asceticism, but because practical, affordable light bulbs (not to mention large-scale electrical generation and transmission) had yet to be invented. His commute to work involved getting onto a contraption called a “strap-hinge stagecoach” and coaxing a team of horses along dirt streets. The “Old West” was still just “The West” — legendary lawmen Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were still relatively young men.

Grandpa Truitt died at the age of 89 when I was 12, in 1974. He went, in one long lifetime, from that world to a world where passenger jets zoomed overhead as he watched men land on the moon on a color television.

I remember an old man named Mr. Johnson in my old neighborhood in Richmond. He had a bent back and very kind eyes. He lived with his wife in a little house on Wall Avenue, at the other end of the alley from my family’s house. He was well into his 90s when I first encountered him, in 1969 or so — which means he had been born sometime in the early 1870s. Given the fact that a large number of African Americans at the time of his birth were former slaves, it is well within the realm of possibility that his parents, and perhaps even older siblings, had been owned by other people.

It is also conceivable that Mr. Johnson had, as a young man, encountered an old man that had been alive during the American Revolution.

Do that perhaps 15 more times — old men meeting young children — and you’re back to the late Roman Empire.

I mention all this because I think each of us has a responsibility to honor and pass along the little fragments of history we receive from time, for our safekeeping. It is how societies learn from their collective mistakes and make progress in tackling their challenges. If a society is like a living being, then the study of history is that being’s wisdom.

In my lifetime, the United States has made tremendous progress in terms of race relations. In the year I was born, 1962, the brutal beating of the Freedom Rider civil rights activists at the hands of white southern mobs in collusion with local law enforcement authorities was but a year in the past. Fifty-one years later, we have an African-American president.
Progress, however, does not mean our work is done — far from it. Four hundred years of history is still present.

Paul Ryan, the Republican congressman from Wisconsin and former vice presidential candidate, recently said the following:

“We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”

He got in a fair amount of trouble for saying that. The source of the trouble is that, given his education and intelligence, that statement is remarkably blind to history.

Black neighborhoods have historically been deprived of the basic ingredients of economic progress: schools have been neglected of funding, it is nearly impossible to find a conveniently located bank in which to get a savings account or cash a check, local businesses have a far harder time getting loans that a few miles away in white areas are more easily procured, and so on. Basic dietary problems abound: It is nearly impossible, for example, to buy fresh fruits and vegetables in the rougher parts of Richmond, which has been described as a “food desert.”

I’ve said it before in this column, but our predominantly African-American neighborhoods need comprehensive help. I am convinced that, given economic opportunity and development support, places like East Oakland and Richmond would prove Ryan wrong. Far from being filled with “men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work,” they are filled with men and women who would love to work but have little to no opportunity to do so. Public works and job training would go a long way to showing any supposed “cultural problems” to be the illusion they are.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.

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