Editorially speaking...
So the Royal BC Museum has blinked.
www.victoria’sbestplaces.com
Now they tell us that the Old Town exhibit hasn’t been trashed after all, that it’s going to be laundered and reopened as what the Times Colonist terms a ghost town.
The saga of the RBC over the past six months or so has been anything but reassuring to either history supporters or taxpayers. Here’s hoping that the government and RBC management (one and the same, folks) are finally getting their act together.
It’s vitally important to all and future British Columbians that they do so.
* * * * *
As the noted philosopher George Santayana penned many years ago, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Or as German philosopher Friedrich Hegel said more cynically, “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history”.
COVID-19, the second worldwide pandemic that followed the infamous Spanish ‘Flu by a century, appears to be with us yet in mutated and reduced form. But have we learned anything?
Vaccines were available within six months of the outbreak, only to be rejected—virulently and violently—by many around the globe.
Despite the fact, incredibly, that we live in the penultimate age of ‘information.’
Never in the history of humankind has knowledge become so readily accessible via computers and news and social media. Accompanied by, as has also become so prevalent, a mistrust of sources. ‘News’ or information or ‘truth’ are, it seems, like charity, in the eye of the beholder. As a result, a new word has been coined by both sides of the argument: “misinformation.”
According to the latest statistics (Times Colonist, Jan. 27, 2023), the rejection of COVID as “a hoax or exaggerated” led to—I’m quoting—2.35 million people delaying or refusing to get the vaccine between March and November of 2021.
It’s not my intention to use the Chronicles as a soap box, I’m just pointing out that history can be a road map to the future. But only if you choose to use it as such.
* * * * *
Speaking of the benefits of living in a digital world, Chemainus’s internationally famous historical murals are now ‘high-tech.’ You can now see them almost come to life: the blowing of a steam whistle, the sounds of pistons moving—even birds calling.
It’s all part of the new virtual world of viewing the murals not just by eye but with your smartphone or tablet that almost transforms them into movies—what’s termed “augmented reality.”
May wonders never cease.
* * * * *
And in keeping with my lifelong pattern of being a dollar short and a day late, Happy Valentine’s!
* * * * *
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” —William Faulkner, courtesy of the Nanaimo Historical Society