Monday, May 27, 2024

I was watching Franklin on Apple TV, the story of Ben Franklin and his negotiations with the French for help while fighting for America’s independence from England. All the intrigue and double cross and treachery, but all seen as honorable, as necessary, to reach a positive outcome in the fight for independence. All this happening just a few years before Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antionette, who supported the American revolution, were guillotined and France was changed forever. So much pomp and circumstance and chivalry and betrayal and honor and deceit. America was fighting for its freedom, while its slaves were being utilized even beyond their own measure. Such are the absurdities of history.

The thing about history is that it can be such a beautiful tapestry of nations or peoples striving for the best outcome in their fight for survival and prosperity and progress. It is said that history is written by the victors, but it is also a fact that it can be revised by those who lost, and then in hindsight won the argument. The Spartans at Thermopylae lost the war, but won the argument. Their resilience and determination not to surrender to an enemy superior in strength and power did not deter them. One day, hopefully, the Ukrainians will be able to boast of such unbelievable accomplishments! Maybe one day the people of Gaza and the West Bank will be able to live in their own country.

But what about Africa; what about the Native Americans; the people of color in the South Pacific, of Papua New Guinea, the Aborigines of Australia? What about their history? Where’s the chivalry and pomp and circumstance and music and poetry celebrating them? There are, of course, local legends, but not strong enough to be celebrated the way the Europeans, people of the Caucasian races, celebrate theirs.

There was a time when we were all equal, I believe. Several thousand years ago when we first started to evolve into the human beings we would eventually become. Where did we, the people of color go wrong? Did we take the wrong turn on that highway of opportunity and just settled for what was right in front of us? Were our mental capacities so limited that we settled for less, while the white peoples strived for more and more? Were more vicious than we were? What happened to Egypt and Persia and Abyssinia and Mesopotamia and the rest of Africa? What happened to the Incas and Aztecs and Mayas? We built temples and pyramids and palaces when the Greeks and Romans and Britons and French and Germans were still savages! Calendars and mathematicians and scientists and inventions alien to the so-called western world! The Moors gave Europe architectural miracles, music, literature and language, Spain in particular. Yet today their homelands are considered Third World!

How did we forfeit our destiny to the barbarians of the time? How did we become the savages, the lesser races? We all know that the now western civilization wouldn’t exist without us. So, why is it that people of color are in such dire straits, and have been that way for at least the last thousand years, if not more? Maybe it’s because of what researchers like James Watson and the Human Genome Study concluded, that blacks were less intelligent than their white counterparts? I personally think that such findings are preposterous. People of color have produced scientists who have invented a lot of the tools used in medicine today, in technology and also in agriculture. But their achievements have been co-opted or marginalized by those in power, especially in the United States!

Whatever the reasons, we, people of color, black, brown, yellow, and in between, bear this unfair burden of having to prove ourselves. That we are as good, and sometimes even better, than those who try to keep us in this more elusive labyrinth of oppression, of confusion and inferiority, to make us more pliant, more subservient!

Some say that it was geography, opportunity, curiosity, that enabled the western world to attain the wealth and knowledge we so obviously lacked, or refused to act upon, with all the foresight we supposedly inherited. That we were too lazy, and needed others to guide us out of the darkness of our own limitations.

So, they conquered us, colonized us, made us slaves, and built their cities and economies on our backs, for free. How did we let that happen? We could have discovered gunpowder, or at least ventured east to acquire it. We could have cleared our jungles and built cities to last forever, but we didn’t! Why? We can’t always blame the white man for our problems; sometimes we have to look inwards. But still, why?

I don’t know the answer to all that, but maybe it was just fait accompli, the way things were destined to be. Quien sabe?

I write this all with a mind clouded with wine and weed, but with a clarity that comes from age and experience and curiosity, and the hope that you will forgive me for my ramblings. My purpose is always to have you think, of all the possibilities, of all that might have been, and could still be!

Glen