Ive begun reading Howard Zinns A Peoples History of the United States. Really, quite a good history lesson, of the sort that textbooks never tell you. Ill quote some of the jacket cover to give an overview of the book, in case somehow youve not heard of it or are not familiar with the historical bent.
Since its original landmark publication in 1980, A Peoples History of the United States has been chronicling American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version of history taught in schools with its emphasis on great men in high places to focus on the street, the home and the workplace.
A Peoples History is the only volume to tell Americas story from the point of view of and in the words of Americas women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers.
And while I am glad to be reading the book, as there is much I am being exposed to, of which I was previously ignorant, I am however losing a certain level of bliss. I almost want to stop reading, but the VERITAS ink keeps reminding me that truth is better than comfort, and ignorance, while blissful, is still ignorance, and to be remedied whenever possible, and without much regard to the cost. So I plunge ahead, but I am sickened.
Human history is patterned with injustice, cruelty, human barbarity, wars, slaughter, genocide, oppression, and constant struggle. The pursuit of wealth has killed millions who have stood in its path, and the gap between rich and poor has almost always existed, and been used to justify a division between respectable and not, educated and not, governing and not, powerful and not, worthy, and not. Furthermore, I dont realistically see any of this changing. My life in part is a hope to just pass under the radar, to avoid the main road of the rat race and to stay out of the way of the bullets and bombs and destruction, devastation and war fronts. To avoid conflict, as it rages everywhere, and as perhaps it should. We should be fighting for equality, for justice, for human rights, for sustainable economies and natural resource consumption, for the right to an education, for the right to feed ourselves and our families, to not be brutalized, to not be butchered or captured, to not be tortured, to have rights to our bodies and minds. But are these not things that the lower classes have been struggling for for centuries? And have we really come so far?
Things just seem desperate to me. Our lives rather meaningless, and certainly so when we pull back at look at ourselves and this planet from a universal perspective. And here I am, this insignificant among the billions, a blip in time, whose goal is to find what happiness I may, to give what happiness I can, and to die as painlessly as possible. Though I am fine with a horrible death. Count me among the millions in history who have died similarly, and whose names and personalities are lost, not even a footnote in history. The countless in time who have perished through war, tsunamis, earthquakes and volcano eruptions, through burnings at the stake, hangings, lynching, at the whacks of the machetes, at the dismemberment, the disease, the parasites, the starvation, the dehydration and diarrhea, the genocide this, it seems, is the norm. It no longer strikes me as strange. Awful still, yes, but the common way of things. In certain senses, I am resigned to it, and not at all afraid. Ive begun to look at myself from farther away, so to speak, from another perspective. And I am insignificant in the scheme of things, important only in the small circle of people I authentically engage with. But history will not remember me, and Im not sure Id even want it to. Its too unnatural and absurd, it seems.
Since its original landmark publication in 1980, A Peoples History of the United States has been chronicling American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version of history taught in schools with its emphasis on great men in high places to focus on the street, the home and the workplace.
A Peoples History is the only volume to tell Americas story from the point of view of and in the words of Americas women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers.
And while I am glad to be reading the book, as there is much I am being exposed to, of which I was previously ignorant, I am however losing a certain level of bliss. I almost want to stop reading, but the VERITAS ink keeps reminding me that truth is better than comfort, and ignorance, while blissful, is still ignorance, and to be remedied whenever possible, and without much regard to the cost. So I plunge ahead, but I am sickened.
Human history is patterned with injustice, cruelty, human barbarity, wars, slaughter, genocide, oppression, and constant struggle. The pursuit of wealth has killed millions who have stood in its path, and the gap between rich and poor has almost always existed, and been used to justify a division between respectable and not, educated and not, governing and not, powerful and not, worthy, and not. Furthermore, I dont realistically see any of this changing. My life in part is a hope to just pass under the radar, to avoid the main road of the rat race and to stay out of the way of the bullets and bombs and destruction, devastation and war fronts. To avoid conflict, as it rages everywhere, and as perhaps it should. We should be fighting for equality, for justice, for human rights, for sustainable economies and natural resource consumption, for the right to an education, for the right to feed ourselves and our families, to not be brutalized, to not be butchered or captured, to not be tortured, to have rights to our bodies and minds. But are these not things that the lower classes have been struggling for for centuries? And have we really come so far?
Things just seem desperate to me. Our lives rather meaningless, and certainly so when we pull back at look at ourselves and this planet from a universal perspective. And here I am, this insignificant among the billions, a blip in time, whose goal is to find what happiness I may, to give what happiness I can, and to die as painlessly as possible. Though I am fine with a horrible death. Count me among the millions in history who have died similarly, and whose names and personalities are lost, not even a footnote in history. The countless in time who have perished through war, tsunamis, earthquakes and volcano eruptions, through burnings at the stake, hangings, lynching, at the whacks of the machetes, at the dismemberment, the disease, the parasites, the starvation, the dehydration and diarrhea, the genocide this, it seems, is the norm. It no longer strikes me as strange. Awful still, yes, but the common way of things. In certain senses, I am resigned to it, and not at all afraid. Ive begun to look at myself from farther away, so to speak, from another perspective. And I am insignificant in the scheme of things, important only in the small circle of people I authentically engage with. But history will not remember me, and Im not sure Id even want it to. Its too unnatural and absurd, it seems.