When you are my age you have
much more past than future. This
definitely skews your perspective. You
also find yourself thinking more about the past than the future.
Paraphrased from Orwell’s
(Eric Blair) 1984: He that controls the past controls the future and he that
controls the present controls the past.
In my seventy plus years I
have seen the history of the past skewed and in some cases rewritten. When I taught history classes in high school
I would impress on my students that history is written by the winners of wars
and that the same event seen from different cultures and different locations
could be viewed totally different – and in all cases things are lost in
translation. There is no absolute truth.
Even just in this country
events are seen differently in the west, south, north east, mid west and with
different perspectives in different cultures.
Each of these groups will attempt to see history recorded from their own
perspective.
Where am I going with
this? Hell I don’t know.
During my school years I was
raised in the Mississippi Delta in a town called Rolling Fork. Rolling Fork was the county seat of Sharkey County .
It had a strong Confederate history that it clung to – a pride in the
South and the Civil War and a disdain for all things not southern. The Confederate flag flew over the Mississippi
Capital in Jackson .
Rolling Fork was segregated
and proud of it. White people ran the
town and defined its history. Today
Rolling Fork is a dusty Delta town and its only claim to fame is as the home of
Muddy Waters.
Events flow through
time. You can’t mold liquid.
The Ol’Buzzard
Muddy Waters' mojo is good enough for me!
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