Editorial: Be a first author of this pandemic's history

As we confront this surreal and brutal pandemic, we inhabit history.

We have an obligation, to ourselves and to our progeny, to be its first authors.

On Sunday, columnist Burt Constable wrote about Julie Klein's class at River Forest's Trinity High School. She is directing her junior students to "think like historians."

They should not be alone in that thinking. If each of us is not now at work on a journal of these consequential times, we are doing ourselves a disservice, as well as a disservice to those who would look back on us.

We owe it to our grandchildren and to their grandchildren to pass down a sense of who we are and how we've coped, to help draw a vivid line that interconnects this pandemic with the family tree.

Choose today to be more, in the decades and even centuries that come, than a name stumbled across in that era's version of Ancestry.com.

We owe it to posterity to help people in the future learn from our trials.

Help them understand how lives were affected, what heartache and anxiety was felt, what innovations were attempted, what foolhardiness was entertained, what breakthroughs were achieved. Help them see what courage and sacrifice and heroism served as our inspirations.

We owe it to history.

Look back into the histories of the last great pandemic a century ago. They are replete with stories from average people, from letters loved ones sent to each other, from diaries found tucked away in attics and inside footlockers.

Those were the first authors of history. Today's first authors are all around us. Any of us can be one.

You don't have to work for a news organization. You don't have to write a book. You don't have to produce a Hollywood movie. You just need to write. You just need to photograph. You just need to record your experiences, your observations, your thoughts.

Do so. Worry later about what becomes of it. For now, keep your journal. Trust that it will find its future.

You may have heard of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Or perhaps you haven't. Even so, scholars have. More than 20 centuries ago, he aroused Rome as its most celebrated and influential orator.

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to always remain a child," he said. "For what is the worth of a human life unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?"

Think about that for a moment. Not just the meaning of the words he spoke - though they are profound; and yes, though they form the backdrop for this modern-day editorial.

But for a moment marvel also that you're reading thoughts that come to you from across an expanse of 2,066 years. At one time, they were inside Cicero's head, rolled off his tongue.

In a real way, in reading them, you bring ancient Cicero to life again. It is as if he is here, still talking to us. And actually, he still is.

Words extended Cicero's life. But not words alone. We would not know about the words, we would not know he ever existed, much less what he believed and thought, unless those words had been written down.

Of all the treasures that have been granted us, one of the greatest is the gift of language and our ability to document it.

It is life altering, this gift. It is life giving.

With that gift, humanity is able to do something spectacular that none of the other species sharing the planet can equal: To pass the things we learn in this lifetime on to those who live in lifetimes far beyond ours.

It is the basis of all progress, the reason each generation is able to build on the achievements and discoveries of preceding generations, the reason we're able endlessly to extend our reach.

It is the reason, this storehouse of recorded wisdom, that we now can reach for the stars.

What truly separates humanity from all the other species is our ability, and our compulsion, to share information with subsequent generations.

Each of us has the ability to be a part of that. With this brutal pandemic, each of us can be a first author of history.

Write. Photograph. Record.

We owe it to our progeny. And we owe it to ourselves.