Sunday, July 15, 2012

Giving history a rightful thought....

Inside great times history is commanded by greatness of a people and by great people, from within the walls of our view port do we misunderstand our place in the timeline.  Do we confuse the optimum decisions for ones that make for a better read of history?  The statement is as such, "Let history be the judge" now to most of us this sounds like a great line from a hero being forcing their will upon the timeline and commanding the very essence of recorded life to change and be magical.  For what is should be seen as, is in fact it is an excuse to explain bad or poor behavior on the part of the actors.  The people who write the history as well as those that are lucky or unlucky enough to get entered in as players in the timeline.  Each person either the writer or the actor will portray their makings as either hero or villain and to show the face of sainthood towards the posterity that will have to sort through the mangled wreckage of truth.

Now this may sound as if history is now nothing more than a wicked and debased retelling to revise what was once real to make it more palatable to modern ears.  To which that historians both ancient and contemporary are not to be trusted.  This willful ignorant path towards our history has be explained to me as a mix bag of really poor reasons to not trust what the past has to tell us.  That somehow our story that we write today could not and is not even remotely similar to what has happened.  Or that we could stop and learn about what was and how that could help further explain and define what we are as a people today.  For the most part history suffers from a lack of PR, the very name strikes fear and loathing into the hearts of most who hear it.  Changing its name is surely out of the question but changing how it is used is not.  Calling something history should be a beginning of study of what, who, where, when and why.  Not simply turning the page and allowing dust and age to allow the lessons learned to fade to a background with no real meaning behind them.  Though it is true, "what is done is done and cannot be undone" it is more a less an opportunity to overcome what has been done and how to change what could be done again.  Taking the evil and wrongs from a story to paint a better light upon perceived heroes and the odd turning villain to martyr usually helps in the healing of pride for nations, but it does no good to hide or to alter what happened.  Changing the details to make the story more appealing fundamentally changes what lessons could be learned or gleaned from the happenings of the past.  Changing facts to make the growth or the posterity of a people seem golden and divine all to hide weakness or past sins only feeds vanity and greed of a people and distorts their collective view of the world around them and proves to them that their thoughts and actions are somehow pure and uncorrupted.  This strange relationship with history and how we view and learn from it are in fact a fundamental function of our society.

We base our laws and decisions on our ancient and current past, we build connections with others through a common history, through connections that where made centuries ago and we allow them to be rebuilt and grow stronger with time.  Hiding fact from the pages of history does us more disservice then allowing a nations or peoples pride be hurt or defamed.  Knowing what was is far better then being fooled into believing devils to be saints and saints to be devils.  Never mind the subjective nature of interpretation, that is no ill, the fault comes in trying to predict the interpretation and attempting to alter what could be learned or understood from the story.  Subjective understanding of fact is not the same as alter fact, true one group can find devils while another would call the same saint.  The altering of fact is the true sin of a high disreputable order it takes away the will of one to actually learn the truth behind who, what, where, when and why.  The subjective mind will see their own reasons for the who, what, where, when, and why while the objective mind will try to learn the actors reason for the who, what, where, when and why.  Morals and happy endings seem to disappear when objective eyes are place upon the timeline, but what was lost in happy endings and wonderful sounding morals we gain in actual knowledge of human behavior and how to overcome the common obstacles that crowd the human space and cause fault within our systems.

History is the story of us and where we came from ignoring it and not giving it a real place in our lives distorts what we do and taints our actions with a sad tinge of ignorance.  There are so many wonderful symbols that adorn us as well as our buildings and we take them for granted never truly knowing how our thick roots started first as a sapling.