FEATURED IMAGE CREDIT: An AI image about people injured by narratives who are also injured by the fact that the image is AI. (Sora)
By Marie-Lynn
I study history because history has closure.
People lived, made choices, fought, built, published, loved, lost, and died — and only then can we understand what it meant. The arc completes. The wound scars over. The meaning settles. History is the only place where human suffering is metabolized into something intelligible. Even the tragic becomes educational once completion exists.
Today’s media provides the opposite of closure. It rips open events and never closes them. The scandal is breathless, the accusation is urgent, the outrage is immediate — and then the story is abandoned before it resolves. There is no follow-up, no reckoning, no synthesis. Tomorrow brings a new panic, and yesterday is quietly erased. Nothing is learned because nothing is finished.
This creates a population of walking wounds: anxious, disoriented, angry, and perpetually unfulfilled. Modern media injures people not by harming their bodies, but by denying their minds the completion they need to make sense of their own reality. Humans cannot live indefinitely inside open narratives. Without closure, there is no adulthood, no diplomacy, no forgiveness, and no history — only crisis without catharsis.
This is why I read history. It is where the human story is allowed to end, and only then can we understand what it meant.
I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil. And that no one knows the truth.
- Molly Ivins