Time Capsules

One of my favorite cities in Louisiana, just about an hour's drive outside of New Orleans is the 'Strawberry Capital of the U.S.', Ponchatoula, Louisiana. Ponchatoula (Named after an Indian tribe there with the same name) is is bucolic and a typical sleepy small town. There is a nice and large university there, The University of Southeastern Louisiana, that I have suggested to Jane as a place she might want to attend college. I read today on-line that Poncthatoula is celebrating it's 150 year anniversary and in accordance has unearthed and opened a time capsule in downtown Ponchatoula buried in 1961. It contains some treasures from the city's past in the form of newspapers (including a copy of a Pontchatoula Examiner newspaper from 1902), old photographs and memorabilia from the 1961 centennial celebration.

This has me thinking (Oh, no! Not that...) about time capsules. They used to be popular but with today's age of electronic recording seem quaint and impractical to many. I don't believe many cities or organizations bury them anymore. It is a shame because time capsules are selective memories rather than a general catalogue. They better help the future understand the past because they contain items the past feels are important to remember. No judgment is needed as to what memorabilia was important to those of the past, because it is in the capsule itself. Yet most historians say that when a time capsule is better it is usually filled with useless junk, perhaps for their own purposes, but I find them revealing.

If you had to make a time capsule for your city, country or the world, what would you put in it? We have so many video and electronic product mediums today that maybe we don't need those capsules anymore. Society's ordinary documentation leaves many trials already. And does a time capsule hold up after 100's of years? I think, for example, if we placed our modern electronic mediums inside may deteriorate or perhaps be unable to be used in the more updated electronic devices of the future. So putting too many of those kinds of things inside might be a mistake. The simple and less degradable photograph would be better.

How would you represent society today with what you put in the capsule? Surely, it would be affected by your prejudices, biases, experiences, belief etc. Time capsules are just a slice of life from one viewpoint so they reveal far different orientations. For example, one person may put inside something about Mother Theresa while another might substitute an Osama bin Laden memory, a good versus evil look at our present future could use to draw far different conclusions about life in the early 21st century.

There are so many types of time capsules, as in the selective ones in which objects about one specific subject are placed inside. There are businesses that sell those cylindrical metal canisters that people can place their items for their own personal Time capsule. But again, what to put inside? If one places purely personal items they tend to be less interesting and revealing to the person who opens the capsule if they have no family or personal tie to the one who buried the capsule. Yet items of "the world' can be to general to be appealing.

There is even a web site http://dmarie.com/timecap/ that can give you a time capsule page of information for any date you place at the site's search engine. Try a date or two in it. It is interesting. When I went back 100 years from today I found that the price of a new car then was only $100, that one could get 20 loves of bread for one dollar, and that every one oe the top songs of that year listed is unknown to me. Anyway, I think you can omit one thing in your time capsule. That would be any of the stupidity I write to you here.