Father Damen

Here's an old essay from the archives (7/27/96). Thanks to Alice for jogging my memory.

Forgive me, Father Damen, for I have moved to within a few blocks of your namesake street, and I know nothing of your works and what you mean to this city. I live in a generation in which history means nothing, where we are ignorant of what went on before and continue to make the mistakes we could have avoided had we only known the exact same mistakes have been made before. Mistakes are often referred to as learning experiences, but the mistakes of the past do nothing to educate us today, since we are so focused on the now (vainly believing that we are entirely unique, that no one has experienced that which we experience today) that looking back just a few years doesn't seem worth our while.

Your name still exists vaguely in our consciousness, but only because of the white-on-green signs that mark every street corner. Were it not for streets and schools, you and the other pioneers would exist only in the dusty and untouched corners of the local public library branch. Kinzie, Altgeld, Du Sable, Damen. If your names register at all, the thought consists of the image of a street sign. A few of us know of you, but any attempt to inform others labels us as slightly brainy eccentrics, bearers of nothing more than mildly interesting trivia.