Relentless March of Time

It was on this day in 1917, Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany. It seems rather odd that it was 94 years ago and that just about anyone who could remember the event has past on. It is amazing to think in my lifetime it has gone from a distant to nearly obscure event. It is even more difficult to consider the "modern world," of 1917, how utterly foreign it would be, to me or my son. But then you think of James Gillespie who serviced in a Maine regiment during the Civil War, just how different the world was for him when he walked into the Seattle Armory and volunteered on this date in 1917. America could not have look anything like the America that he decided to help preserve in the spring of 1861. Or did it to him? I look at the photos of my family's great road trip in June of 1970, and see threads and familiar things that makes me think that things aren't so different. Twenty years from now, I wonder if I'll think the same thing. And twenty years from now, will my son be able to recognize anything familiar in America 1970, verses America 2031. Tonight, Mount Adams as see from outside Goldendale, in June 1970 and the twenty-first century touched up version.