There is a certain kind of history that deadens the senses + re-constitutes our sense of time, so that our internal compasses are continuously turning us backwards + away from what is right in front of us. Rather than understanding what preceded the right now in terms of lifes authentic movement -- dynamic, alive, shifting, spiraling -- we learn it in an unnatural hefty monolithic box of static (sometimes glorified, other times distasteful) that cuts off our connection to lifes continuous pulse + to a sense of vitality that knows how to be active in the creation of our present realities. So many times when talking about modern problems that have to do with social justice I am re-routed by the other person to the past...to the successes of the womens movement, the free speech movement, to the creation of democracy itself. As if these were the endpoints to struggle, simply because they were amazing. While these historical moments are undeniably critical to know about, + can serve as important examples + sources of inspiration, to continuously, mindlessly, reach for them as our go-to reference points in the face of new challenges is to reveal an almost traumatized neglect of what is currently happening, as if we were dreamily recounting the roses our boyfriend bought us...way back before he started to hit us. To actually pay attention to what is happening in the present tense is to step down from the abstract boxes that we have been taught are noble to occupy. Turning away from the swollen victories of our past in order to step into our present losses is to embrace a fractured humanity rather than an ideal divorced from the actual labors of human sweat, rather than a flimsy romantic conception that requires no real awareness or responseability. Our collective glory moments are definitely interwoven profoundly with the present, inseparable in many ways from present time (what is present time) but by now they have necessarily shifted, split open, grown apart, demanded that new + exciting + terrifying + destructive outgrowths be rent across the fabric of our collective understandings. Time is a moving river, is multiplying cells, can turn into a gigantic dam, or a deadly cancer. But we are still trumpeting what was, what we once did so well + not even, it seems, to take stock of the potential power, the unspeakable light that was present in those triumphant moments where the human desire for justice prevailed against tyranny, but rather, to forget that time has continued to plow forward, dragging our aging human bodies along with it, + in the process inconveniently re-tangling the threads of our nation’s destiny with a whole new hodge-podge of predicaments, with new + unforeseen threats to our nation’s better selves. We are so afraid of things that are alive: our potential, our pain. Why are we still being mindlessly taught about democracy when we arent collectively able to grasp when it is under attack, or at this point, perhaps even MIA? If we cant feel democracy in our present bodies, in the living existence of our countries organs, + sense its life force (or lack there of) why even learn about it in the first place? Simply to sedate ourselves with a complacent nationalism + then fall asleep while drinking four-dollar chai under a picture of Mario Savio at the Free Speech Movement cafe after crossing a picket line to get to class? Oy. The main reason school is almost universally boring (at least up until higher education) is because it has absolutely nothing to do with the present moment. It is largely a disempowered experience that re-routes our sense of time, our creativity, our passions, our questions + our concerns to things that once were, that once were, that were. There is no sense of a beating red heart, of gasping lungs, of eyes that can see, of minds straining to reconcile new predicaments to the ideals of living senses. We arent called upon to really KNOW, to feel, to engage, to demand, but rather, to thoughtlessly collectively re-route ourselves to a place where pain cant touch us, but neither can joy, community, or power. Our standards of education are inadequate for the current challenges that face us. They have not directed us, en masse, to the most important piece of the whole damn thing: to our natural sense of things, to our innate ability to face life as it is, to grapple with time + experience as it moves + speaks to us, long before it has been categorized by historians + lumped under a blank textbook heading. We have to twist the hands of our internal compasses to the future, while being firmly rooted in a present that has an enlightened awareness of the contributions of past struggle. Until that happens we may naively get trapped in the abstractions of an intellectualism that buys scones from university cafes whose walls righteously recount the demands of the radical...while questioning nothing, numb to those forces bred of ignorance that could hold our future ransom, trapped in an “education” that breeds a type of knowledgeable certainty, of distant security, that could only come to exist + trust itself outside of the haphazard movements + rigorous burdens of the times that we actually live in.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Apr 2014 01:21:15 +0000
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