Since I neglected to write about the experience at the time, I thought I would take this evening to reflect on having seen the 9-11 memorial exhibit last month when it was visiting the Erie County Fair. However, I can’t quite think of what there is to say other than that it was a powerful experience. The sense of human loss was very much present to the space, and the scale of devastation was more apparent from looking over the wreckage of a jet and the collected pieces of office equipment pulled from the site than it ever was from seeing ground zero when it was two, three, and four years after the fact. It was astonishing to still be able to smell the smoke on the items in the exhibit, even ten years later.
But what affected me on levels that went far beyond pure emotion was finding myself in lines of people pouring over the photographs, and video footage, and lists of names, and artifacts, with children beside me in that line who were infants when the attacks occurred, and others who were not born until the years following it. I was only in high school during 2001, but 9-11 remains such a fresh memory, and yet there I was ten years later among children who were already looking back on this as a part of history that has only affected their lives distantly, in ways that they could not directly experience. As I watched the video of the plane striking the second tower and confirmed that it matched up frame for frame with what I could still see in my mind, I heard a father behind me explaining to his children, who were seven or eight years old, about what happened on the day that was being commemorated there. He told them about the attack in the briefest of terms and then added, “You weren’t even born yet.” His child then asked him, “Were you?”
The enormity of this thing is almost unimaginable to those of us who witnessed it, but on the scale of human history it is so small. Children were born on the afternoon of 9-11 and every day thereafter, and most of them have never had to try to imagine that suffering or loss.
It is an ego-centric perspective, but what the memorial did for me above all else was give me a unique sense of place within my own life. I saw my first pictures of the attack as I was walking into American History class. I attached much significance to that fact even at the time, knowing that what was unfolding would someday have a chapter of its own in those same textbooks that I carried into the classroom. The exhibit and the ten year anniversary mark the fulfillment of that notion. At twenty-six years old, unlike at sixteen, I am now every bit as much a bearer of prior history as I am a witness to its continued unfolding. Over ten years I have seen so much strife and discourse and change grow out of the events of September 11, 2001. But the end result of all of that is, for the children who stood beside me at the memorial, simply the way their world is and always has been.
One might think that children seem especially small viewed through the prism of recent history, but in my experience it’s really the other way around. Looking back on 9-11 in their presence dwarfed the event. For some people much older than I, the attacks may seem like yesterday. For me it is a fresh memory, yet also a distant one. But for those born in the last ten years, it is literally a lifetime ago. That thought affects me much the same way I was affected when I watched Carl Sagan’s Cosmos documentary series and first glimpsed the timeline of the universe condensed into the scale of one year. On that calendar, all of human history has taken place within the last minute of the last day of the year. No doubt some people find that thought unsettling, but in the past couple of actual years, it has given me the greatest comfort I’ve ever known. With such a diminished sense of my own significance, none of my problems can seem much worth worrying about, and not even historic tragedy has the permanence to weigh very heavy for very long. Children are born into a new world, all but untouched by former pain. Time moves steadily forward. And while for some of us the wound may never heal, even never is not so long.
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Friday, July 15, 2011
California: Teaching Discrimination Through Good Intentions
Shortly after I heard about the new California law mandating the teaching of gay and lesbian contributions to history, I heard that it had passed largely along party lines, and then it was pointed out that many Republicans objected to the bill on the grounds that it required the teaching of subject matter that “many parents may disapprove of.” Really? That was the primary argument against it? The opposition didn’t discuss the bill’s possible effects on the quality of education? No one objected to it on the grounds that it cheapens the presentation of history, or that it ridiculously supplants existing laws against discrimination in textbooks and teaching? No one thought to consider how the law would be enforced, and argue against it on the basis that it might make the writing and publication of decent textbooks substantially harder by cluttering them with absurdly irrelevant content? The major argument against a law mandating that educators reference the sexual orientation of contributors to history and that they leverage in such persons where such contributions are not evident or sexual orientation is not known was that it might make some people uncomfortable?
After signing the bill into law, Governor Jerry Brown remarked that “history should be honest.” Well, no kidding. I heartily agree, and so I’m genuinely curious as to whether Governor Brown really believes that the best way to make history honest is to impose artificial requirements onto what must be taught in any given subject. You see, in my view, whether the cause is noble or not, mandating a specific narrative in history is not honest education, it’s propaganda. By contrast, laws preventing discrimination in education, like the one that has just been overturned, are better positioned to promote honest education, because far from imposing a narrative on history, they work to prevent any such imposition. I’m an extremely liberal guy, but I don’t think it’s any more beneficial to skew the presentation of history in favor of my worldview than it is to skew it in the opposite direction. There are two roughly equivalent ways of limiting children’s understanding of history: You can gloss over aspects of it that don’t fit the rhetorical narrative you want to convey, or you can wedge in elements that do, regardless of their actual significance, historical relevance, or unbiased truth.
The unfortunate truth about American history is that property-owning, married white guys have always held a hell of a lot of power. As a consequence, though, they’ve done a lot of great stuff. That shouldn’t be grounds for blacks children, gay children, poor children, or girls to conclude that their role in history yet to be written won’t be just as significant, but I think there are better ways to convey that belief than by making such efforts to demonstrate the role of people like them in history that they impair their understanding of the progress that society has made.
I’m not implying that there haven’t been enormous contributions to history from gays and lesbians, or any number of other minorities. Certainly there have been, but presenting a particular kind of agent of history should never take precedence over simply presenting history as we understand it to have happened. The sexual orientation of a particular historical personality is usually not relevant unless, say, their historical contribution is in the area of gay rights. The sexual orientations of many historical figures are simply not known. Will California teachers and textbooks now be expected to go out of their way to assert that this long-dead person or that might possibly have been gay, or will they have to search all the back pages of history to find those who we know were? There is plenty of speculation that Abraham Lincoln and William Shakespeare were gay, but there is no way to retroactively prove that assertion, and besides, it doesn’t really matter.
In light of that, this new law is in danger of having the opposite of its intended effect. Specifically delineating the contribution of gays and lesbians – as if they stand in contrast to normal people – only serves to solidify the impression that they are a separate class of people, with their own culture and history, which the government must officially force into the existing narrative. But within a narrative that prohibits exclusion of any class of people without decreeing that they must be represented regardless of the extent or clarity of their contribution, it doesn’t matter whether a person was gay or straight if he signed the Magna Carta or fought in the Civil War, it just matters that he contributed to history. If we avoid discrimination, rather than teaching to it we can present historical figures simply as people, not as sub-classes thereof. And then any child in the classroom, whether gay or straight, white or black, can believe that he or she too might play a similarly powerful role in history, because he or she is just as human as they were.
After signing the bill into law, Governor Jerry Brown remarked that “history should be honest.” Well, no kidding. I heartily agree, and so I’m genuinely curious as to whether Governor Brown really believes that the best way to make history honest is to impose artificial requirements onto what must be taught in any given subject. You see, in my view, whether the cause is noble or not, mandating a specific narrative in history is not honest education, it’s propaganda. By contrast, laws preventing discrimination in education, like the one that has just been overturned, are better positioned to promote honest education, because far from imposing a narrative on history, they work to prevent any such imposition. I’m an extremely liberal guy, but I don’t think it’s any more beneficial to skew the presentation of history in favor of my worldview than it is to skew it in the opposite direction. There are two roughly equivalent ways of limiting children’s understanding of history: You can gloss over aspects of it that don’t fit the rhetorical narrative you want to convey, or you can wedge in elements that do, regardless of their actual significance, historical relevance, or unbiased truth.
The unfortunate truth about American history is that property-owning, married white guys have always held a hell of a lot of power. As a consequence, though, they’ve done a lot of great stuff. That shouldn’t be grounds for blacks children, gay children, poor children, or girls to conclude that their role in history yet to be written won’t be just as significant, but I think there are better ways to convey that belief than by making such efforts to demonstrate the role of people like them in history that they impair their understanding of the progress that society has made.
I’m not implying that there haven’t been enormous contributions to history from gays and lesbians, or any number of other minorities. Certainly there have been, but presenting a particular kind of agent of history should never take precedence over simply presenting history as we understand it to have happened. The sexual orientation of a particular historical personality is usually not relevant unless, say, their historical contribution is in the area of gay rights. The sexual orientations of many historical figures are simply not known. Will California teachers and textbooks now be expected to go out of their way to assert that this long-dead person or that might possibly have been gay, or will they have to search all the back pages of history to find those who we know were? There is plenty of speculation that Abraham Lincoln and William Shakespeare were gay, but there is no way to retroactively prove that assertion, and besides, it doesn’t really matter.
In light of that, this new law is in danger of having the opposite of its intended effect. Specifically delineating the contribution of gays and lesbians – as if they stand in contrast to normal people – only serves to solidify the impression that they are a separate class of people, with their own culture and history, which the government must officially force into the existing narrative. But within a narrative that prohibits exclusion of any class of people without decreeing that they must be represented regardless of the extent or clarity of their contribution, it doesn’t matter whether a person was gay or straight if he signed the Magna Carta or fought in the Civil War, it just matters that he contributed to history. If we avoid discrimination, rather than teaching to it we can present historical figures simply as people, not as sub-classes thereof. And then any child in the classroom, whether gay or straight, white or black, can believe that he or she too might play a similarly powerful role in history, because he or she is just as human as they were.
Friday, March 25, 2011
The Corporation
I watched the 2003 documentary "The Corporation" last night. There was a lot of excellent material in the film - a lot that seriously affected me, and a lot to analyze and extrapolate. But the ideas most relevant to this blog emerged from my consideration of the section that discusses corporate collusion with twentieth-century fascism and moves on to, perhaps with a slight tinge of melodrama, draw lines connecting the nature of earlier fascism with the nature of modern corporations. There was expert commentary discussing the notion of multi-nationalism and how it lets business transcend the need for direct influence over government. The main idea, I take it, was that the same craving for power that drove fascist dictatorships can be evoked by corporate businesses in much more subtle ways.
Another portion of the film shows an old business training film explaining the virtues of incorporation, namely limitation of liability. This, as far as I can tell, is practically the sole reason for the existence of the corporation. And as a consequence of it, even if there is the same mad grab for power in a corporate business as in a fascist regime, and even if there is a similar perversion of morality, there is no dictator to whom we can assign blame. There is no face that we can identify as a mask of evil.
The liability is spread thin in a corporation, but so too is the damage it does. It is much harder to be angry at something amorphous that does a lot of harm in tiny increments the world over than it is to be angry at a dictator commanding the military that oppresses your own people as well as others.
It brings to mind ideas that have been in my mind a long time. I feel that there are many evils that mankind does not destroy, but rather just channels into different forms. When we have risen up against evil in one form often enough, it learns to adapt and camouflage itself. Western society will be long without brutal dictators not because we are through with barbarism and base impulses, but because it no longer needs brutal dictators to indulge those impulses.
Dictators fall. They practically ordain their own demise when they take power. When you possess that power all on your own, everyone can see that you have it, and the masses beneath you or the external interests around you will wrest it from your hands sooner or later. All they need is for the dictator to push them far enough that they reach their breaking point. Such a breaking point requires two things: a critical mass of conviction or frustration or pain, and someone against whom to direct it.
But we can't overthrow the proverbial Corporation. And it's difficult to reach a critical mass when we're all directing our fears and concerns and frustrations to different directions. Some of us agitate against the pollution, some of us the plight of oppressed workers, some of us mindless consumerism, and even if we're all angry, it's hard to articulate why or at whom.
The evils that man does on a grand scale today are so much harder to pin down than they were in past generations. The change happens slower. The control over men's lives is more subtle and gradual. The harm done is more widespread but less spectacular when its mechanism is not militarism but capitalist imperialism. So what does that mean for us that aspire to breaking points? It could be, perhaps, that with the evil effects taking hold more slowly, broadcasting themselves more quietly, the same must happen with the good. The change that we want to see in the world comes about step by step, matching the evil that it is fighting in spiraling, slow-motion conflict.
Or it could be that we still need to reach breaking points sometimes, but that they're harder to get to, that the container in which that critical mass must build is larger, that the place to which the eventual eruption must be directed is not particular and minute, but is instead everywhere. And maybe, if this is the case, the result of mankind itself being pushed too far will be a spectacular triumph beyond anything that has been witnessed before.
Another portion of the film shows an old business training film explaining the virtues of incorporation, namely limitation of liability. This, as far as I can tell, is practically the sole reason for the existence of the corporation. And as a consequence of it, even if there is the same mad grab for power in a corporate business as in a fascist regime, and even if there is a similar perversion of morality, there is no dictator to whom we can assign blame. There is no face that we can identify as a mask of evil.
The liability is spread thin in a corporation, but so too is the damage it does. It is much harder to be angry at something amorphous that does a lot of harm in tiny increments the world over than it is to be angry at a dictator commanding the military that oppresses your own people as well as others.
It brings to mind ideas that have been in my mind a long time. I feel that there are many evils that mankind does not destroy, but rather just channels into different forms. When we have risen up against evil in one form often enough, it learns to adapt and camouflage itself. Western society will be long without brutal dictators not because we are through with barbarism and base impulses, but because it no longer needs brutal dictators to indulge those impulses.
Dictators fall. They practically ordain their own demise when they take power. When you possess that power all on your own, everyone can see that you have it, and the masses beneath you or the external interests around you will wrest it from your hands sooner or later. All they need is for the dictator to push them far enough that they reach their breaking point. Such a breaking point requires two things: a critical mass of conviction or frustration or pain, and someone against whom to direct it.
But we can't overthrow the proverbial Corporation. And it's difficult to reach a critical mass when we're all directing our fears and concerns and frustrations to different directions. Some of us agitate against the pollution, some of us the plight of oppressed workers, some of us mindless consumerism, and even if we're all angry, it's hard to articulate why or at whom.
The evils that man does on a grand scale today are so much harder to pin down than they were in past generations. The change happens slower. The control over men's lives is more subtle and gradual. The harm done is more widespread but less spectacular when its mechanism is not militarism but capitalist imperialism. So what does that mean for us that aspire to breaking points? It could be, perhaps, that with the evil effects taking hold more slowly, broadcasting themselves more quietly, the same must happen with the good. The change that we want to see in the world comes about step by step, matching the evil that it is fighting in spiraling, slow-motion conflict.
Or it could be that we still need to reach breaking points sometimes, but that they're harder to get to, that the container in which that critical mass must build is larger, that the place to which the eventual eruption must be directed is not particular and minute, but is instead everywhere. And maybe, if this is the case, the result of mankind itself being pushed too far will be a spectacular triumph beyond anything that has been witnessed before.
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