Large Fierce Mammal

Source: The Go-Between and The George! by Eva Jordan

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” ~ L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

The line quoted above simultaneously introduces L. P. Hartley’s tale relating hard-won lessons of youth, and offers a concise package of advice for all who feel a calling to redefine history in a “modern” context.

The times, and most particularly the Season in which we find ourselves, are prone to expressions of revisionist history. YouTube and similar platforms abound with authoritative videos about who stole what tradition from whom, what is authentically “traditional’ in THE classically original sense, who is right, who is wrong, and who is to blame.

I look askance upon the term, “universal human experience”, not just because of its obvious ignorance of cultural perspectives on the universality of anything experienced by humans, but most particularly because in any group of humans who are present when an experience is simultaneously shared, it will be impossible to find a consensus on what happened, who experienced what, why everyone but the person describing it in the moment got the details wrong, or even if any kind of experience was experienced at all by anyone.

Redefining and discounting history — anyone’s history — is not a path to finding Truth if there is any hope for a cohesive society anywhere. I posit this in full understanding that recent history is rife with evidence that ancient hatreds, like volcanoes, are never extinct, and sometimes violence is the sole answer of choice.

The following is inspired as much to those known to be living the legacy, near or far, as it is the pontifications of opinionated onlookers.

Bloody Foreigners

By LFM

In the course of shared experience
Much will be left behind,
Some by right of conquest,
And still more just lost to mind.

Those things that are remembered
Aren’t remembered all the same,
In deciding when to celebrate,
Or cast the stone of blame.

Some suffer still the rights and wrongs
Of generations past,
Who’s now to stand as culpable
For rolls of dice long cast?

Attacking what societies
Have chosen to extol
Depletes the REAL objective —
That those dice no longer roll.

So remember while you’re naming blames,
And choosing what is “fair”,
The past’s a foreign country,
They have different customs there.