2002-04-26 - 10:06 p.m.
It is easy to open up a history book and read about the past and the connections between ancient peoples and trace the origins of events as they weaved their way through foreign lands and came to be through actions that were undertaken by long-dead people who no longer matter. It is easy to take a book, any book, history or not, and try to read it as a story. It makes things easier because you may not have to live it. You may not have to think about it, outside of the covers that bind the pages, because when you are tired, or bored, or have other things to do, you can close that book and go back to living your life.
History books are often filled with things about the past that sometimes seem staggering. You come upon a story of 6 million people being killed in a holocaust; or one million people killed in a holocaust; or a million man march; or a hundred thousand people displaced by a earthquake; or fifty thousand people fleeing for their lives because of nation-state border disputes; or fifty billion dollars lost by a country or embezzelled by an energy company; or two million tons of bombs dropped on a foreign country because it was thought to be in that country's best interests of liberation from its own government; or one hundred thousand people marching in the streets of one country demanding freedom for the people of another country; or twenty thousand people lying in the putrid muddy shallow graves in the aftermath of a fascist government leader's attempt at supremacy; or two thousand people dying over the course of a year in street clashes in demanding their land and freedom; or five hundred people calling the rubble which was their former homes their new gravesites following a battle in the war on terrorism; or one hundred people out on the march trying to get people to sign their petitions asking that their tax money not be used for killing foreing people they've never met or have anything against; or ten people from around the globe lying on the ground in front of tanks in order to protect the owners of that land from being taken over by a military force; or four pre-teens being shot and then crushed by tanks in order to guarantee their death without the risk of them doing any harm to soldiers; or one eleven year old girl being used as the sexual slave of a battalion of occupying soldiers everyday for a month before she is no longer useful at which time she is shot at point-blank range between the eyes...all in the presence of her mother and father just before they are killed themselves.
There are a trillion and one souls that occupy the spaces between the letters written on every page of every book ever written. A trillion and one souls who died never knowing justice, without freedom, without praise, without a name. Haunting us now, these souls seep through our pores, enter our lungs, look in our eyes, wail in our ears, stomp through our minds. They do everything possible, and we still do not realize they are there. We send more of those among us to join them. We turn our backs to them. We refuse to believe they ever existed. And as they look at us from the pages of our history books, as they cry to us from in between every line, we close the book in order to go to our life of bondage. We go to our minimum wage jobs. We go to seek lustful pleasures of the flesh from a sex partner, or our own appendages, or a chemical in a syringe. We burn up the treasures of the earth to attain speed in our automobiles. We give in to our animal instincts to look better than our rivals in order to win new mates. We sell our souls before we have a chance to lose then on a battleground.
And those history books will never be about us. Those history books will never tell our tale. Those history books will look back on our time and tell a story that we are living now, but have no part in, becase we do not realize that it is happening to us.
And as my freedoms are ripped from my existence; as my liberty is pulled out from under my feet like a rug; as my name is dragged through the mud for living where I live and doing the things I do; as the noose tightens around my neck because I stuck it out too far to have my say; as I fester in my pool of disgusting guilt; my fellow patriots pass by me, oblivious to my plight or to their automatonic existence. Nothing saddens me more than to know that we have wrought our own destruction after so much effort by so many souls to make things right. After so many warnings. After so much education by our teachers who were wise enough to hear what the metaphysical had to say.
As I lay dying, I want the world to know that the new souls that occupy our world should never occupy the spaces between the ink in history books.
�
�
