ON BEING REMEMBERED

Watched Night of the Museum 2 last week, it was a nice movie. Really enjoyed it. However, there is this one particular phrase in the movie that struck me. It is the one uttered by the “animated wax replica” of General Custer near the end of the movie. To paraphrase what “General Custer” in the movie said, “I am remembered by that one failure that I made”. And that one failure he mentioned refers to his ill – fated “Battle of Little Bighorn” or more famously, “Custer’s Last Stand” (see Wikipedia for the details). The phrase struck me because it reminded me that history is not solely about the record of great deeds, of towering success, of stunning victory. In fact, more often than not, history records failure with more lucidity than success and General Custer doesn’t enjoy the singular distinction of being a great failure. There are many more failures like him that littered the pages of history. The reason for this is because history is the collective memory of a people, of a nation, of a race, of a civilization. It is not just about names , dates, and places of famous people, place or events. It is about past experiences engraved in the collective memory of a people. It is from this collective memory that we seek success by trying to emulate acts of great personalities and at the same time, avoid the costly mistakes of historical failures. There is however, something in common that successful great men in history and those men deemed as historical failures shared and that is they have ambitions and they have the audacity to realize such ambition. Many have ambitions but few possessed the audacity to achieve it and the few who dared to live up their dreams, some end up a success while others failed either due to an act of nature or to their own blunder but in spite of that, we “remembered” all of them equally. It is due to this reasoning that I came to the conclusion that “being audacious has its rewards; you either end up as a monumental success or an epic failure; either way, you’ll be remembered.” But of course, being remembered for as a success is way better than being remembered for as a failure.