The Problems of the World.

[browngirl]

This is not a cheerful entry. When I woke up this morning I was exceedingly cheerful, but that seems...selfish in light of the problems of the world.



A high-school student was beaten severely after participating in the Day of Silence. As yet there's no PROOF that this was a hate crime based upon her participation, but the fact that another student screamed epithets at her during her participation mere days before she was found beaten in the street is rather coincidental, no?

I find myself wanting to send this article to my parents and the other adults from the churches I was raised in, to my college friends who steadfastly maintained that gay marriage is wrong, to all the conservatives I've ever heard talking about the 'gay agenda', all the Christians I've heard preaching that homosexuality is a sin. I want to ask them if this is what they want, this is what that brave girl deserved. I wonder how many would say yes.



The Baghdad Museum is being looted and destroyed. (Incidentally, if you don't already subscribe to the feed for riba_rambles, do so. She and khaosworks do more to keep me informed than the Globe by at least an order of magnitude.)

So what, you may ask. Those are just things.

Well, no, they're not 'just things'. Before Iraq was called Iraq, it had other names, names such as Persia, Babylonia, Sumer, Mesopotamia. The Tigris and Euphrates that our soldiers forded are the rivers that birthed the oldest human civiilization. The jewels and statues that were taken, and above all else the cuneiform tablets that were crushed underfoot as the looters rampaged, were evidence and information from that civilization, the cultures that preceded it, and the civilizations that followed, and now, after traveling thousands of years through time to speak to us of the long-disintegrated hands that worked them and long-dead minds that thought them up, those artifacts are gone, silenced forever.

In a thousand years how will we be remembered, we Americans? I think that now we may well be remembered as the people during whose war the legacy of over 7000 years of history was destroyed, the people who allowwed (by some accounts, encouraged) that destruction.

When I was at Harvard I was privileged to take some classes where I was given coins from 500 BCE and pottery from 2500 BCE to touch and examine. I nearly cried with happiness, touching these things, thinking of the hands that made them long ago, the faces of their creators and users looking at them, as close to them as mine was. I thought of the unbroken chain of history and humanity, from their ancient hands to my modern ones, and on into the future for future children to wonder at when I and all I know are dust. Now that chain is broken in Iraq.

Why am I going on, when papersky said it so much better?

OK, I need to buck up. I need to eat my breakfast, recall my lovely waking, be good to my friends and pack my books, and not forget to buy a card for that brave girl. In these times of trouble, what else can a small finite human do?

Comments

[clauclauclaudia]

The looting is, alas, complete. The National Library is in ashes, too. :(

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

WD told me. I burst into tears.

A.
despairing

[poltr1]

It's like the library in Alexandria. I don't remember who did it; all I know was it was done. How much information did we lose? How would things be different if it were still around, intact?

*sigh* To quote Carlos Santayana, "Those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it."