To Remember or to Forget

I came across a great post this past week from FarmnWife dealing with the 2012 Drought and blogging.  There was a perfect line in it that blogging is "written proof of our farm heritage we pass on to future generations." 

If you have grown up on a farm and have had the privilege of being around your grandparents or anyone else of the "Greatest Generation", you have probably had the opportunity to hear lots of stories.  Yes, we like to joke about the "walking to school, uphill, both ways, in a raging blizzard" stories that we hear over and over, but there is a more important aspect to their stories.  It is the ability to picture what has gone on around us, on this ground, in times past.  We get to have a mental image of the Great Depression, the droughts of 1950s, the mechanization of agriculture and what was produced and what it yielded throughout the years.  If you are really lucky you have someone (probably Grandma) who has kept track of many things either via a journal, cutting out of articles, or calendars filled with daily temperatures and moisture amounts.

Are we losing this same ability to pass on to the next generation?  Are we (or I) so busy dealing with what is going on around us, we are forgetting to record many of these events as they occur around us?  Yes, I keep track of daily rainfall (or lack thereof) and record it on a website but can that be truly passed down to my grandchildren for historical purposes?  I am involved in Social Media but will we be able to retrieve that information in the future to show what happened on a daily basis or will it actually be able to give us a broader view of what went on during this time?

Stories are important.  History is important.  What is happening now is important to remember even though much of it we may want to forget it about it at this moment. I would like to reiterate the importance of blogging on about what is going on.  If you don't want to blog then Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc about it. At the minimum start a journal to remember these times.  Your grandkids may roll their eyes at the stories but it will be the living history about your farm, about their farm, for them to pass on to their grandkids.