Who are we and why are we here?

These questions are taken from the Ross Perot campaign of 1992. In a Vice Presidential debate, Perot's running mate, retired Rear Admiral James Stockdale started things out by saying, Who am I? Why am I here?". At the time, I like other folks tuning in, scratched our heads and muttered, "is this guy all there?" and probably laughed really loudly thinking he was just a senile gentlemen with a bit of a sense of humour. Well, as I have gotten older and involved in different activities outside of my job, I have found myself asking the same questions. Andrew (Seig Heil!) beat me to the punch and did a very nice breakdown of each event, analyzing the pros and cons. As I began going through his breakdown of living history events, I found myself asking, "Who are we? Why are we here?". Well, upon answering those questions, I found that the major driving force for the reason we do the things we do revolves around educating the public in regards to the maritime history of the area. At every event (even the pure reenactments), our group does educate the public by either directly engaging folks in attendance or by trying to paint them a picture of what it was like in the time period we are portraying. With those primary objectives evaluated, then it was time to review the perks provided by each host site, whether those be monetary based or intangibles. It's not like we are all about the Benjamins but it is nice to be compensated with stipends, food, access to collections or pure honest-to-goodness southern hospitality. You know what we found, with exception of two events, every host site treats us well. Some differently than others but in the end, we receive some compensation for everything we do. I think this was a healthy process and should be applied to our everyday life.