All my life (I'm 42) I have had the feeling that "the world" will end soon, or at least civilization would end soon. I was a little kid in the 70s and my dad had a shed in the back yard that was filled with unmilled wheat in barrels and that awful dried chemical food, I think it was from a company called Mountain House, and he had apocalyptic tracts in the house such as The Plain Truth, and I used to read that stuff and play among the barrels. I know that survivalism and "retreating" as it was called was very popular then, but I seem to have internalized it to the point where I was telling my 2nd grade teacher I wanted to kill myself because the world would be nuked soon.
Anyway, as I have grown up and read various fiction and nonfiction accounts of civilization collapses, I have been thinking about maybe keeping a diary so that sometime in the far future people will know what it was like to live in 21st century America just before the collapse. My mom is a Mormon and Mormons have a big emphasis on keeping diaries and journals, and when I was little she kept buying me pre-bound blank books meant for keeping a diary, but I thought it was pointless, what was I going to write, how all the kids at school bullied me all the time and how I wanted to die? And for some reason that would be as much value to historians as the writings of Mormon pioneers? Uh, sure.
But lately I've been thinking about novels that talk about a mysterious diary being dug up centuries after it is written and how the diary is one of the only surviving writings of the period, and periods of history like the collapse of the Roman Empire when literacy had been forgotten and thus historians don't know exactly what happened during the final collapse. I've been hearing anecdotal stories about how kids today who are under the age of 11 or 12 really can't read or write anymore, the sort of illiteracy that preceded the collapse of Rome.
Sometimes I think that maybe I should find one of those blank books and start keeping a diary, after all if civilization goes away all the electronic records will be gone or unreadable, and it's possible that there will be few literate people left to record events. Thoughts?
Anyway, as I have grown up and read various fiction and nonfiction accounts of civilization collapses, I have been thinking about maybe keeping a diary so that sometime in the far future people will know what it was like to live in 21st century America just before the collapse. My mom is a Mormon and Mormons have a big emphasis on keeping diaries and journals, and when I was little she kept buying me pre-bound blank books meant for keeping a diary, but I thought it was pointless, what was I going to write, how all the kids at school bullied me all the time and how I wanted to die? And for some reason that would be as much value to historians as the writings of Mormon pioneers? Uh, sure.
But lately I've been thinking about novels that talk about a mysterious diary being dug up centuries after it is written and how the diary is one of the only surviving writings of the period, and periods of history like the collapse of the Roman Empire when literacy had been forgotten and thus historians don't know exactly what happened during the final collapse. I've been hearing anecdotal stories about how kids today who are under the age of 11 or 12 really can't read or write anymore, the sort of illiteracy that preceded the collapse of Rome.
Sometimes I think that maybe I should find one of those blank books and start keeping a diary, after all if civilization goes away all the electronic records will be gone or unreadable, and it's possible that there will be few literate people left to record events. Thoughts?
