“The past year and a half alone in Korea has changed the landscape considerably.”

As this PhD researcher continued presenting at the Fulbright spring conference last week, I couldn’t help but come back to this single brief comment she made while explaining her dissertation on the South Korean reunification industry.

From nuclear missile test launches to brief détentes to joint Olympic teams, and now a planned Donald Trump-Kim Jong-Un meeting, the last few months on their own could warrant an entire book. Perhaps this researcher at the podium will end up writing a bestselling treatise about the reunification proceedings unfolding daily.

Regardless of outcome, the articles in the New York Times, Yonhap News, and the rest of the coverage feel different. Maybe it’s just the result of recently reading more biographies, or maybe it’s the un-deniability of how big of a pivot point the 2016 elections were, but we know for certain that these events on the Korean peninsula will end up in Asian history books again and again, as more than just a footnote.

History is easily glossed over, like Bush Jr. beating someone in ’04 or some Democrat defeating some Republican in ’74. They start to fade into the background, like the scratches on the wooden dining room floor that you can’t remember how they got there.

But now, now it feels different. Now in our early-to-mid-20’s, we are now just starting to reach the cusp of time where history is more than paragraphs in a Pearson education textbook. While we were old enough to remember where we were during 9/11, we weren’t mature enough to know our opinions regarding the event, except that we felt a raw fear that was based upon the fear in the eyes of the adults around us.

Yet now history has aged like wine just enough that we can have opinions about the vintage based our real-time and personally lived experiences, rather than through secondary sources. We have become primary sources to history, and we are just starting to write the books about it. Barack Dreams of his Father may be part of our dreams, Hillary’s emotional yet blunt question of “What Happened?” is the same question we might have asked ourselves, and the experience of the disillusioned non-coastal non-elite may have been our experience or that of someone we know. History is becoming more assessable because it’s our history. No longer is it the one framed on the wall of my mom’s study or even Churchill with a cigar and tommy gun pasted on the wall. What’s going up on our walls in 25 years is in the news now.

With that accessibility comes both opportunity and danger. Opportunity in that taking ownership of history is empowering and motivating. Dangerous, for our emotional investment in history as it is being written—your history, my history, our history—risks us becoming mired in the emotionally taxing and painful details, causing us to fail to see the bigger trends. Only with a more objective and reflective eye can we accurately identify the macro movements that will become tomorrow’s Pulitzer Prize finalists for non-fiction.

Yet we are not—and cannot be—always objective. There’s a reason why we can write a seminar paper on Stalin’s brutality and not blink an eye as we sneak in a footnote simply to help us reach the minimum page count that details how millions of minorities were killed under his watch. And yet we feel an insatiable, burning anger coursing through our fingertips as we blast a political party or leader for the thousands affected by a closed border policy.

One is history written in our blood, the other with someone else’s ink. One will inspire a tear, the will other not. The present is our future’s history, and we are now complicit in what transpires. It will be us being the old folks in the proverbial rocking chair saying, “Back in my day.” There is no more, “You had to have been there to understand.”

Back at spring conference, one of the presenters had us write down a five-item bucket list for the rest of our time in Korea, and someone called out, “Make it onto Korean television!” A lofty goal, no doubt. Yet it’s inescapable, this gravity of wanting to be seen as meaningful. To be deemed newsworthy by the whims and winds of a subjective society.

We are in our early-to-mid-20’s, cresting at a point where we are starting to make waves. Where we do not just analyze the news for history class or fodder for Lincoln-Douglas debate competitions. We see events through our own eyes and make decisions on our own; the GS analyst sees one thing and makes a stock pitch of a lifetime, the entrepreneur drops out of college for an idea, the teacher decides to head abroad to stay abreast of global education trends. The present is in our control, making tomorrow’s interpretation of today’s events actually consequential for us to consider.

Because we have been given the responsibility of the next chapter of history, we can also write on the blank pages to our liking. It’s this belief that only the people in the past—the Luddites in our high school AP US History textbooks—had change happen to them. It’s a whirlwind, this realization that we’ve now added agency to the shortlist of tools in the toolbox. And it’s just enough of a tool to create rather than copy, reason rather than rant, act rather than acquiesce.

Now, we can be the ones to impose change onto the rest of the world. Look at me…I am the captain now. If not the world, then at least our communities. If not our communities, then at least ourselves.