Krzysztof Wodiczko's "Critical Vehicles."

     Krysztof Wodiczko's "Critical Vehicles" is an article which discusses the over-saturation of past cultures bleeding into future cultures which make up the melting pot of today's society. Wodiczko's article states that the aftershock of past history, such as the Cold War is still being felt in contemporary society. The United Nations have referred to the last quarter century as the "Migration Era" because so many immigrants are looking to join this country, that the number of people looking to enter this country has reached statistics which are comparable to the nineteenth century immigration wave. There is however one difference between the immigrants who came here during the nineteenth century and those which are moving here now. The difference between these two groups is the immigrants who come here now are already walking into communities which are already established whether it be a community which is inhabited by other foreigners or a community of American citizens. So what role do these new immigrants play in contemporary American communities? Their role is actually to unbuild this community and help rebuild a new, different one which will take their past traditions and cultures and together with others, transform them into a more diverse community. Now, some might argue that by doing this, you are destroying the memory of the old country and culture that was left behind. In my opinion, losing a portion of past traditions is inevitable when joining or building a new community, however this is also the great thing about starting a community because you are able to take the memories and some traditions from the past and infuse them with the new ones which will be inherited by this new group.
     Wodiczko believes that within every immigrant is a vision of a new city to come which is even greater than that from the past and better than that which is there in front of them (present). One issue that often happens however is immigrants will have to flee their country because of a war or an unfortunate event which causes them to leave their country to protect their own lives or even more important their families lives. When something like this happens immigrants will have a "wounded" outlook on their new way of living, which will cause them to have a biased outlook on others around them who do not share this same experience. Wodiczko talks about how the Victors deprived the Nomads of their  history and once completely taken over, took their history away from them so that Nomads were later only looked at as geographic subjects, who in theory "did nothing". He than makes the comparison that just as Nomads have went down in the history books as people who "did nothing", society has presumed that migrants and immigrants have nothing to contribute to the great public debate. In other words the past is meaningless unless there are people who can keep tell the history of their culture. Therefore, at first encounter many cultures tend to be skeptical of others who are different from them because they can be a potential threat to the history which made them who they are. He states that: "the most questionable question, 'Where are you from?,' should never replace 'In what way can your past and present experiences contribute to everybody's well-being today and tomorrow?". Unfortunately, people often still ask a person where they are from and based on their answer, make assumptions and cast judgments on others.
      Krysztof also believes that history tends to repeat itself but people can use past mistakes in history to prevent them from repeating themselves.In order to do this however, each day history needs to be rewritten in order to correct the injustices of the past. What he means by this is that we as human-beings need to first honor the past by remembering it, than pass the knowledge of it on to others so that it will live on and lastly, use the errors of the past in order to change the present and the future. The worst thing that we can do is be like the Nomads who lost their history by not defending it. It is essential for growth that we our first human-beings before we our citizens of a country or members of a community. While being members of a community or culture help us define our pasts and our own identities as well, we also need to realize that migrants or immigrants also have their own identities that they bring to the table. We all belong to many different groups or cultures which help make us who we are and this is very important, but we also need to take a step back and realize that as humans we all share at least one common group or community together and it is important to carry on past traditions which help each of us establish ourselves as individuals.