Monday, June 23, 2014

HISTORY, RECOLLECTIONS AND RAMBLINGS





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

1 comment:

COMMENT: Ben Franklin said, "I imagine a man must have a good deal of vanity who believes, and a good deal of boldness who affirms, that all doctrines he holds are true, and all he rejects are false."