The Milestone Protocol, Ernest Dempsey [100 best novels of all time txt] 📗

a table. The picture blurred into another that featured the clay jars that contained the scrolls in Qumran. Another image followed, this time showing off the dig site at Göbekli Tepe.

Tommy paused a second and looked back at the screen as it continued to change, each slide showing pictures of important discoveries in the field of archaeology.

He returned his gaze to the audience, panning over them to make each person feel as if he were speaking just to them on a personal level.

“History is important,” he went on. “We all know that, yet we see people pushing it aside all over the world. In some places, mostly in larger cities, we have witnessed the destruction of history.”

The image on the screen changed again. A picture of the tomb of Jonah appeared, then replaced by one of rubble where the mosque containing the tomb had once stood—the result of a terrorist attack. Another image displayed rioters taking down statues in various American, Canadian, and European cities. Other monuments showed the effects of vandalism by paint or hammer or chisel. Ancient ruins were marred by burn marks or graffiti. One picture displayed a proud group of protestors in masks standing over a toppled column that dated back to the fourth century BC.

The room was already silent, but with each subsequent image of the destruction, it grew more reverent. The place felt somber, church-like. Tommy knew that the story within the pictures had made an impact.

“This kind of thing must cease,” Tommy said, “lest all of our hard work go in vain. People have politicized things of the past, things that have already happened and cannot be changed. They have used history’s sins or mistakes as a rallying point for anarchy and destruction, and in the process have caused us to lose a part of ourselves, who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.”

Tommy strode across the stage, again meeting dozens of eyes as he looked out over the crowd. He was strong, and just a touch under six feet tall, an imposing brick house of a figure.

“One of my favorite quotes comes from Life of Reason by George Santayana. It says that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. How can we remember the past if we are so zealously destroying it? While not all of the past is pretty, it’s important we keep those mistakes in our memories.”

New images of the Holocaust appeared on the screen behind him. He didn’t need to look back. Tommy could see the reactions on the faces before him. A terribly sad image bloomed onto the screen. It showed children, mothers and fathers, grandparents, all skin and bone, piled into mass graves just outside the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar. The picture gave way to a video from the old archives.

“These people are German citizens from the city of Weimar. They claimed that they didn’t know what was going on in the forest just a few miles from their homes. Despite the occasional ash snow or the random trains that came and went, these people went on living their lives—perhaps in ignorance, perhaps by selective ignorance.”

The video showed citizens in their dresses and suits helping to bury the dead while Allied soldiers oversaw the process.

“When the Allies busted through the gates of Buchenwald and discovered the atrocities there, they were sickened, but what bothered them just as much were the claims of the people of Weimar that they had no idea what was going on. As punishment for their ignorance—chosen or otherwise—the Allies forced the people of the town to dig the mass graves, a lesson that was intended to make certain such things never went unremembered. And that we should all be keenly aware of what is going on in our world, especially right outside our front door.”

Tommy returned to the podium and took a drink from a glass of water before resuming. The video on the screen stopped and turned to black. Then a new image appeared, drone footage of one of the jungles of the Amazon rain forest. “We must not forget the past, no matter how vile, how offensive it might be to some. It must be honored or revered or feared or loathed, but never forgotten.” Tommy’s voice reached a climax. “And we must continue to strive to uncover more, to learn the history of places we’ve already forgotten.”

He narrowed his eyes and scanned the audience again, holding them in rapt attention.

“The Amazon,” Tommy said with a glance over his shoulder at the sprawling, dense forests. The drone footage transitioned, and the Amazon River appeared, snaking its way through the landscape as far as the eye could see. “What lies beneath all those trees? What is hiding under the foliage of this ancient and mysterious place? We have now discovered the remains of people in the Amazon who have a genetic sequence that matches people in Australasia, DNA that only those people have. They were on the other side of the world, tens of thousands of years ago. History classes would have you believe that people weren’t capable of long-distance seafaring until the Greeks or Romans or Vikings. One must wonder why. Who were these ancient peoples dwelling in the Western Hemisphere? What did they eat? What kind of homes did they live in? What were their religious practices? And”—the screen changed to an image of a miniature golden sculpture that looked eerily similar to a spacecraft—“what was their technology like?”

The screen morphed into spectacular images of the Sahara Desert. “What lies under the sands of the Sahara? Some years ago, my team discovered an ancient pyramid out in the middle of this vast desert. What was it doing there? Who put it there? And how many more ancient sites might exist beneath the desert sands? We now know that ten thousand years ago or more, the Sahara was a much different place, with an ecosystem that was nothing like the one we