Joseph Fouche makes a very sad but true point:
When students of 2050 think of our time (making the massive assumption that they will bother to think about our time), their thoughts would be more along the line of why didn’t Grandpa push Future Hitler under a bus when Grandpa had the chance. Our time is merely a connector between one vaguely memorable event (the death of Elvis) to another (the death of Michael Jackson). Events of the following decades will cast larger shadows than these small times with their small wars, small trivia, and small men. We’ll be the people in the gaps and accordingly will fall through them. Our time and our actions will have an impact on the future but I doubt the future will bother to send a thank you note.
The past recedes further and further away with each passing decade. To the children of the last 20 years, Vietnam is as old and distant as World War II, World War II as ancient as World War I, and World War I as remote as the Napoleonic Wars were to young men of the early 1900s. The time in between tends to, as Fouche notes, fall through the historical gaps.
Perhaps future generations' interpretations of the Cold War will be that of a titanic struggle between dueling hair metal bands:
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