I was watching this video the other day on YouTube about a peculiar place where they treat senior citizens who are afflicted with Alzheimer's disease. This facility is designed to look like 1950's America: complete with 50's cars, diners, signs, technology, etc. There's a lot of interesting stuff in this video to talk about, for instance I find it intriguing that the most memory-provoking time for these elders apparently is the period where most of them were in their teens or twenties. There's also of course the tragic topic of the Alzheimer's disease itself. But I actually want to focus on one specific thing in the video that caught my attention: the newspapers. They had some replica (Or at least I assume they're replicas, they might actually be real, just preserved.) newspapers on display. The headline of one of the newspapers read: "Planes Drop 90,000 Men Behind Germans in France", a title obviously referring to World War Two, probably the mass airborne paratrooper invasion that took place around D-day. Considering the fact that this facility is supposed to be represent 1950's America, having this newspaper displayed here is technically inaccurate. The end of WW2 was in '45. Not that it really matters in this case; the care facility is more so meant to represent that general time period rather than to have complete historical accuracy. Besides, with all due respect to the elders suffering from Alzheimer's, they probably won't notice such a relatively small detail anyway. However, it may not just be the elders who skip over this detail. I wonder how many of my generation or younger would have looked at this headline and thought that WW2 took place during the 50's. Maybe I'm being a bit pessimistic and frankly rude to the intelligence of my own generation when I think this way. I hope I'm mistaken and that only a tiny fraction actually believes the war took place during the 50's. But I'm not so sure. There's an obvious statement I could try to make here about the quality of our educational system, but I'd rather look at this thought in a different way. Instead of deriding the newer generations for not knowing their history, perhaps we should see it as a natural consequence of time moving forward. What I mean by that is, the further along in time we get, the fuzzier people's perception of historical events becomes. This is not just true with one's ability to remember their own past life events, but also with general world history. The reason for this I think has a lot to do with people's personal connection to past events. People care less about an event the less they're personally connected to it. For instance, many people know the exact year that President Obama was elected and the year he left office. They know because they experienced it themselves firsthand. In contrast, the number of people who know the exact years emperor Caesar reigned over Rome is minuscule. We can discuss and compare the historical significance of each ruler but I think they're both at least somewhat similar in importance to each other. Yet one is far more familiar within the minds of today's public than the other. That's because no one alive today has any strong personal connection to Julius Caesar. No one knows any immediate family members that have lived during Caesar's time, nor does anyone feel like their lives have been personally impacted by Caesar's policies and politics. So they care less to know about him. As time goes by, events which are unmistakable to the people living through them become vague to newer generations. This happened to the citizens of Rome, it's happening to our elderly, and one day it will happen to us as well. 1950 was 70 years ago. Imagine teenagers in the year 2090 being asked something like: "What year was the first Iphone released: 2007 or 2017?" Probably a fair percentage of them would get the answer wrong! But can you really blame them? I'm not advocating we should forget our history because it's natural to forget. On the contrary. This is a call to recognize that with the passing of each new day, we are losing more and more our personal connection to the past. Age and Alzheimer's may be fuzzying the memories of our elders, but it doesn't have to be so for us youth.