That’s what this whole blog is about. Write! String words together, make them constructive, make them sensical, make them more than a thought, give them attitude, admit they are me; they are my thinking.
We are at the end of January. I’ve written. I’ve read. I’ve revised. I’ve submitted. I’ve followed. I’ve commented, on politics, on free speech, on the economy, on policy issues, and probably more if I was to break it down. The importance is that I write. I write every day. Maybe not here, maybe not on my stories, but I do write. I seek to explain, entertain, inform, and defend.
I find this past eighteen months instructive in understanding the imperative that Memory Is Tyrannical. Oh. Yeah! Let me amend for the current century: [ apologies to Rosenstock-Hussey] Raw facts are tyrannical. They can be bullying. Why? Because there is no time! In today’s world of instant blogging, posting, tweeting and messaging there is no time beyond the blur of information, no time to verify facts.
So,for the sake of my blood pressure and for my sanity, I’m back in time. From this perspective the past looks quiet. Calm. Unassuming. There is the meme going around Facebook I’m glad I grew up before social media. Most of which claim the giddy feeling because they grew up in the 70s or 80s. Ha! No, before that, back when there were only two, maybe three channels on the TV and they the pictures were black and white. Back when we were informed via newspapers via teletype. When phone calls across the US were a big deal, never mind from continent to continent. Not quite the covered wagon, pony express, not quite.
It’s 1954. The Congo. The more educated black part of the population is beginning to understand that it is not enough to ‘act’ white, or more, correctly, Belgian. It is not enough to be educated the way the Belgian government allows. Now is the rise of the evolue, the most prominent is Patrice Lumumba.
It is 1954. The United Nations. Dag Hammarskjöld is the second Secretary General. He is considered a technocrat, an administrator. He takes over a demoralized organization, traumatized by the ‘red scare’, the McCarthyism in the US, the clash of communism versus capitalism.
The turmoil, politically and culturally, in Congo, over a hundred plus years, is a story of personal gain oppressing a native people, of national interests obscuring sovereignty, and of the willingness of world to allow it all to happen.