 |
|
|
|
If you remember, before all that nonsense of Simon's Centennial Celebration, I flew the paranoid skies to Florida; well I'm back from my trip and for once I wasn't accurate in the prediction that with airline security getting tighter and tighter we'd all end up having to fly in the nude, indeed I wasn't forced to take my clothes off, not once---not even in the shower! But to forget my homage to Carey Grant's excellent performance in 'Charade' for a moment; while I was gone the universe co-incidentally concatenated (as it so often does) something I heard on the wireless with something I read whilst catching up on my backlog of messages on the ANSAX list .
You see at virtually... (and since we are about to be dealing with the old vast backwards, not to mention the abysms, of time you can expect quite a bit of foreshortening here) at virtually the exact same time as the BBC was telling me that the the descendants of Frank Baum of The-Land-of-Ozy fame were apologising for his apparent preference for dead injuns over live ones to Native Americans (or whatever Non-New-World-centric and not terribly satisfying name for them you choose to use in order to minimize the offence you think you're giving, or for that matter, if you prefer and for strictly historically sensitive reasons, to maximize it), at that virtual point of synchronicity when the descendants were agonizing; the denizens of ANSAX, the Old English language, history and culture interest list, were heatedly discussing an article which had suggested that there may have been (as the authors described it) "apartheid-like structures" in the early Anglo-Saxon period, and how the slightly more popular press (at least more popular than the B series of the Proceedings of the Royal Society ) jumped on the term "Apartheid", dropped the "hyphen like" mollifier and happily wallowed in the mud of anachronism, trying to equate mid first millennium England with mid twentieth century South Africa to their gleeful detriment of the former. And this was the press in England that was forcing the ancestral Anglo-Saxon to indulge in a bit of self-flagellation by proxy, so I can't imagine what the press in Wales (as the closest thing to representatives of the supposed aggrieved parties) must have been crowing.
Then again, right after that, I remembered how but a short time ago the City folk of Bristol (the real one, the one in England, that is) had, depending on who you read, recently either narrowly avoided apologising for the slave trade or had already done so some time ago.
By then, of course, I had realised that we really should let people lie in their own time: the nineteenth century is not the twenty-first; nor is the sixth; nor is any time before Bristol slaving ended (in the period from 1807 to the1830s-ish); and, though I admit I have not done the research, I strongly suspect that there are not many people alive today who had much to do with any of those wrongs of the past
Why on earth do we have this modern habit of feeling guilty over things that were not in fact done by us; nor, apart from the Baumies, that we know for certain were even done by our own direct ancestors?
It is actually rather self indulgent and smug of us! Have we moderns really run so low on bad things that we have actually done ourselves that we have to beg forgiveness for our presumably much less holier-than-us antecedents.
And anyway it's not really a question of forgiving but of realising that pretty-much any group will tend to be more-or-less oppressive when they are up and oppressed when they are down, and that everything else is chance; just individuals doing stuff to individuals, where time and tide have dumped them, and when the time's ebbed and the tide is past there's really is nothing meaningful anyone can do to make it all better.
And finally, and not demanding anything of anyone alive now, I for one will happily forgive the Roman Slaver among my presumed ancestors in Germania, or the Pictish and Irish raiders, and those guys going a-viking to East Anglia! Hell! I'll even forgive William the Bastard and maybe even start calling him "the Conqueror" if it will encourage everyone else to realise that the past is the past, and be done with guilt over it.
The past is a great place to visit, but I wouldn't advise dwelling in it nor for that matter morbidly on it!
Cheerio for now
from Richard Howland-Bolton.
|
 |
 |
<-- Go Back |
|
|
| Home | Essays | Notes | Gallery | Miscellany | Contact |
All contents including writing, cartooning, music, and photography unless otherwise specified are
copyright © 1965-2023 howlandbolton.com and Richard Howland-Bolton. All Rights Reserved.
All logos and trademarks on this site are property of their respective owners. | Web work* by 
*as distinct from Wetwork
  |
|
|
