While We Still Have Eyes

Walter McKenzie
Aug 10
4 min read

We have become such a visual society. Scroll through any social media feed and enjoy a survey of smiling faces, group cheers and video clips. There’s something about seeing that’s believing. Of course, images can be so easily manipulated and even created out of thin air these days, “belief” may be stretching it. But if it’s visually stunning – or at least, satisfying – then it’s still something worth enjoying when it’s relevant to our current experience. Technology has created a culture of self-as-celebrity. No judgement in that statement; just a premise to make a point. Bear with me…

It's different from the retrospectives on celebrities upon their passing. You know, the CBS Sunday Morning Jimmy Buffet tribute, where Jane Pauley celebrates his legacy to the delight of parrotheads everywhere. Again, not throwing shade, but when you’re a big deal, you get a bigger eulogy than the common person who has lived their life on their own terms, maybe with a big online following, but without the Hollywood send-off reserved for rock stars, athletes and movie idols.

The world has changed radically in the last hundred years. When we look back at photos from the early 1900s, the faces are frozen in time. There’s little or no context for who they were and how they lived. Sure there’s a caption or a citation that boils things down to basic facts: name…a title if we’re lucky…location, date. From the street cars of San Francisco to the flappers of New York to the everyday pedestrians of Berlin, there’s questions that haunt us viewing from our visually-rich environment of today. What was the atmosphere like in the actual moment? What were the lives like of those captured in each frame? What happened to them after this (or that) shot was taken…not in the next five minutes but in the rest of their lives?

The way we experience old photos is not about them, it’s about us, as we view them from our modern lens. What’s the difference between pics that capture us in the present moment and a photo of Anne Frank taken in 1939? What will our descendants infer looking at our images in 2125? Will they wonder what really mattered from all of our selfies and videos and posts? Will they be able to see past the smiles and celebrations and get a feel for our substance? And what will they decide we stood for? What difference did we make in the path from us to them? Will they be haunted by what they don’t know? What we didn’t say or do? Will there be a disconnect between what we present about ourselves and the history they will know about our era?

It's the moment where John Keating stands his boys in front of the trophy case at Welton Academy and asks Gerard Pitts to read the opening lines from Robert Herrick’s "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time":

“I’d like you to step forward over here and peruse some of the faces from the past. You've walked past them many times. I don't think you've really looked at them. They're not that different from you, are they? Same haircuts, full of hormones, just like you, invincible just like you. They feel the world is their oyster. They believe they're destined for great things, just like many of you. Their eyes are full of hope, just like you.

Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable? Because, you see gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. But if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen. You hear it? ‘Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary. Seize the day’!”

Here we stand, framed in that movie moment, challenged by Robin Williams (who is also now “fertilizing daffodils”) to exceed our mere expectations and lead lives of legendary impact on the world in which we are planted…not in a Jimmy Buffet signing about Margaritas, heartbreaks and cheeseburgers kind of way, but in a “what do we do with the time we have in the moment we are given?” mindset.

Not, “Who handed me this mess?”

Nor, “This is someone else’s job”, either.

Too many of those faces from a century ago disappeared because friends and neighbors and even family said and did nothing as they were taken away. Too many of those atrocities had no witness to stop them except the amoral snap of a camera. And too many of us are keeping our heads down today trying to pretend it’s not happening right here and now.

Every artifact of our existence will be sitting in digital showcases long after we are gone. How will the archive of our photos and videos speak to the future? Will they hauntingly ask what it was all for? Will our lives have answers? Because, surely, the technology of today will provide much more context and connection to the world in 2025. Are we going to be another generation of empty eyes gleaming out over the trophies we’ve collected?

Seize the day.

Take charge of our time left.

Touch the lives of others whenever we can.

Let our legacy be more than the potential we showed up with.

Take a stand now. Not in words. Actions.

While we still have eyes to see.