Today’s post comes from Tamara Kant-Waite, past president pro-tem of the Future Historians of America.

All the hubbub about last Friday’s meteor called attention to an alarming video documentation gap.

We are losing the dash cam race to the Russians.

It seems that dash cams are rolling constantly in many Russian automobiles because drivers are concerned about being victimized in crashes, scams, and road rage. Video proof of the actual sequence of events could be your only insurance against careless and unprincipled fellow travelers.

I hesitate to embed any of the actual images here because they could be disturbing for some of our more fainthearted readers. But if the sight of reckless driving, fistfights, and cars crashing into one another is your idea of great entertainment, you can spend quite a long time looking at it courtesy of the Russian dash cam fad.

Now we know why our parents taught us to be afraid – clearly Russian drivers are unhinged. Or at least a surprising number of them are going down the road with their doors swinging open and their hoods up, unable to stay between the lines and mad as hell. Not that we don’t have our own highway problems – we do. But they’re beating us silly in raw footage.

As a Future Historian, I must sound an alarm. The undocumented peoples of the Earth will surely be forgotten. And among those whose activities are recorded, the ones with eye-popping antics are most assured of a lasting place in the great story of time. Right now, the day-to-day video record of life in the United States is tame compared to the smash-bang wild west rodeo going on in Russia.

Who knew that when Khruschev said “We will bury you,” he meant they would bury us under hours and hours of high speed slapstick and real-life mayhem? Are you going to stand for this?

And if you ARE going to stand for it, could you at least stand for it in the middle of a busy street with tape rolling? Historians who have not been born yet are already hungry for raw footage, and the most compelling stuff being produced today has a distinct Russian flavor!

Yours in the fullness of Time,

Tamara K-W.

She could be right. Perhaps we need something akin to the space race to inch back ahead of the Russians in the video race. Would you put a dash cam in your car if it meant we might close this growing clip gap between the American Eagle and the Russian Bear? Would you wear a helmet cam? Or consider this – with current trends in miniaturization and personal adornments, the most ubiquitous camera of the future might be mounted on a nose ring.

How are you documenting the story of your time on Earth?