It seems only logical that in order to say you’ve moved on from something, you must have first had that thing happen to you. At the very least, you should have been around when that thing happened. How can you move on from something if you’ve never had a personal experience with that thing? That’s like saying I’ve moved on from caviar when I’ve never even tasted the stuff, or that I’ve gotten over my relationship with Natalie Portman when she doesn’t even know I exist. So, to say (or at least imply) that millennials—a very specific group of people who were born from around 1982 to 2002—have moved on from martial law is disingenuous at best, because that thing had already ended before they were even born. In fact, even if we were to say that the millennial age range should actually be reckoned from 1980, it would still be wrong because, well, infants.
To be charitable, let’s assume that martial law was not what millennials are supposed to have moved on from, but the conflict between two political families. Within this context, would it now be accurate to say that millennials have moved on? My answer would still be no. As with martial law, the question really is, did the person or persons have any personal experience of any sort with the dynamic between these two families? That would be unlikely because, again, the people we call millennials now would have been just children back then, and, without social media to force feed grown-up political drama into their young minds, those children would have had better things to worry about. How, then, can they have moved on from something they were probably never too aware of to begin with?
Rather than say the millennials have moved on, therefore, it would perhaps be more accurate to say that many—not all—millennials simply do not know enough about those dark years to be able to form an opinion one way or the other. In fact, I suspect that some millennials probably don’t care about either martial law or political family feuds at all.
Sadly, there’s no disagreeing with that possibility. The truth of the matter is, this kind of apathy isn’t unique to our here and now. Indifference to the lessons of experience actually seems like the default human condition. As for the follow-up insinuation, however, that because the young people don’t care, the rest of us shouldn’t either—well, that’s just wrong.
There is a great deal of information about those dark days, many of them sourced from the testimonies of survivors of torture and enforced disappearances themselves. Some material comes from those who outlived victims, mostly their relatives and friends; and yet other sources include the recollections of those lucky enough to have simply lived through the night without directly coming into contact with the things that went bump in it. These memoirs may not directly prove the actual numbers of victims, but they certainly capture the oppressive atmosphere of fear their authors experienced.
The entirety of this great record reveals the story of a wrong so great that our fundamental sense of fairness tells us it cannot be made right simply by the passage of time, or the forgetfulness of succeeding generations.
So, no. There can be no moving on.