There are many of my colleagues who argue that our mission is change. The agency, they underscore, is presupposed on it. We alter things, tinker with them, make them better.
On one level, I don’t disagree. We gather information and resources. We make excursions to foreign lands - places L. P. Hartley wasn’t entirely wrong about with his maxim. And with what we learn, we change.
I think that word is where I differ with my colleagues. We both believe in changing because of what we see when we look at different moments in time. But what do you change?
For me, it’s about changing your actions. We learn from the things we observe and use them to inform how we move forward. We take the stories we retrieve from a poorly understood and fragmentary past, then resolve to learn from them. We decide to change and make different mistakes than those made by those who came before us. Or even those we made ourselves.
But to my colleagues? Change means something different. More concrete. More invasive. More dangerous. Less meaningful. Less calculated. Less ethical.
I used to be like them. That might be the most frightening idea, too.
Last Updated: March 16, 1994
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