every September our teacher asks why history is important. It's the same responses every time, reworded to make it seem like we are different, intelligent, capable human beings who can think for ourselves:

"so we don't repeat the past"
                             "so we know what mistakes to avoid"
                                                                               "so we are not ignorant"

it doesn't vary, even now when our world is the history, when we live in a time we have already studied and find ourselves powerless yet again.
a sixteen page document emailed to us late at night reads "How the Spanish Flu Prepared America for Future Pandemics" in an effort to comfort us but does not provide relief to those of us trapped with sick families, sick minds warped and destroyed by the news that surrounds us from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep in the bed we spent the day in.

"How the Spanish Flu Prepared America for Future Pandemics" is not a balm for our souls, just a reminder that we are taught to study and analyze to create armor against time but history will always repeat itself, lashing out at the fools who think essays will somehow protect against the cycle, that their words can overpower the earth herself.