History has its eyes on you

There’s a great song in Hamilton called History has its eyes on you. It’s a warning song from a father to a son but it’s also so much more. The earworm part of the song says, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.”

I have always been fascinated with this. History just doesn’t have its eyes on most of us. Whether we are remembered will depend, very much, on who lives, who dies, who tells your story. Alexander Hamilton was one of the founding fathers that isn’t remembered as much as the others. Until the musical you had probably heard of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. If you listened carefully to the musical you now not only know about Hamilton you might also know about James Madison, who even though he was the 4th President, seems to have missed entering into British memory but even Lin Manuel Miranda wasn’t interested in telling John Jay’s story.

When my children were small we liked to take them to historic properties. We would stand in ruined castles and my daughter would claim to get, “the history feeling,” which she described as a tingling of the hairs on the back of her neck, as the echoes of stories that made history buzzed around the empty building. She would always wonder what it would be like to live through a period of historical significance.
“Would you know?” she asked.

We certainly know that we are living through something now but we have no idea of how this history will be written.

It depend on who lives, who dies and most importantly who tells our story. The odd thing is that for most of us, no one will.