150 years ago today, Herman Melville wrote "all civil charms...like a dream dissolve, and man rebounds whole aeons back in nature". Two lifetimes have past. No plaques mark this invisible moment, but my imagination wanders as I walk past places where it happened, now full of texting tourists, girls in daisy dukes taking selfies, and tired Mexican restaurant workers eyeing them from the stairs to the basement, on 5 minute breaks. If I had been a poor and illiterate Irish immigrant, asked to fight and die for a cause I did not believe in, what would I have done? What might I have become? And what will become of those in the future, pressed by a privileged few with the force of a state behind them, to forfeit themselves to a cause even less "righteous"?
Posted on: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 03:23:18 +0000
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