Much of what I learned about history I learned in college. It turned out that a lot was left out in twelve years of catholic school education. I recall as a college freshman in 1969 writing a research paper for a history or political science class. The opening sentence went something like this: “Human history is based on 6,000 years of warfare.” I didn’t start out with that thesis, but that is what I discovered in my research. As it turns out, that was just the tip of the iceberg. And here I was a college student at the height of the Vietnam War, oblivious as to how we got there.
As a teenager in the 1960s, I was profoundly idealistic. By my mid-twenties I had evolved into a sullen cynic. That transformation took place for a lot of reasons (assassination trauma probably not the least of it), but higher education was in large part the medium for that transformation. As an undergraduate, I began to learn about things like the Protestant Reformation for the first time. I didn’t know anything about key historical figures like Martin Luther. How did I miss that part of world history? It was never mentioned by the nuns who were my teachers.
Perhaps my cynicism started with a nagging curiosity about the “why” of things. Those things that had no answers or that were steeped in contradictions. My descent into a feeling of absurdity and meaninglessness began in these years and stunted my intellectual and emotional growth. Not surprisingly, I was a late bloomer, so I didn't consider graduate school until the early 1980s when I was in my early thirties. That endeavor continued off and on for nearly a decade at two universities (SUNY at Albany and Carnegie Mellon University) where I received a master’s degree and a doctorate. A cynic and an absurdist in search of meaning?
In graduate school one of the first things that shocked me was learning about the decimation of Native American peoples through disease, brutality, and manipulation, all starting with Christopher Columbus's "discovery" in 1492. This information had not pierced my educational bubble. As a graduate student, I majored in American History. I learned the basics of the settling of our nation and the glorious Western migration and manifest destiny and the gilded age and the rise of robber barons and the industrial revolution and the emergence of modern society. But my academic focus was on “social and cultural” history. It was here that the bubble of my youthful American idealism burst wide open.
The late 1970's and 1980's was a time of academic change. American historians broke free of old story lines and wrote vociferously on the "darker" side of our nation's not-so-glorious past. The Civil War and slavery were only two of many "reimaged" topics. I read dozens of books on a variety of subjects during my graduate school era. I felt at times that I was reading Dickensian fiction! I knew about slavery, but the brutality of it didn’t fit with the rather pastoral picture I had somehow acquired in my youth.
Then there were the masses, the common people that I was studying. The pioneers who struggled to survive the wilderness. They still fit the idealist's dream. But it was the abject poverty, the abuse and degradation of laborers in the cities, and the enrichment of the few on the backs of the many that, quite honestly, shocked me. Histories (stories) about factory conditions and disease and destitution and infant death and the creation of nineteenth-century institutions to house those who could no longer bear the burden of the “golden” age: insane asylums, poorhouses, orphan asylums, not for the orphaned as much as for the working parents who could no longer feed their children. My doctoral dissertation was on the destitute children and their families and Syracuse University Press published a version of that work in 1996 (See: Mother Donit Fore the Best: Letters of a 19th Century Orphan Asylum).
In the early twentieth century Progressive movements emerged to right many of these wrongs. But even the most basic rights were hard fought: unions, women’s right to vote, child labor laws. Slums persisted for decades and disenfranchisement pushed against cultural norms that couldn’t be broken. Racism and segregation overshadowed American society like a funeral pall. The 1960s brought change and hope but little true "freedom" to America's oppressed. And the road to racial equality was rocky and bloody despite its non-violent philosophies. (Despite positive change, we now find ourselves in a nightmare of blatant, crude racism and white nationalist cultural ideology legitimized by the President and supported by half of the United States Congress.)
America's modern age, the twentieth century, was not spared engagement in war. In fact, it was punctuated by some of the most brutal human acts of violence, power, and hatred known to mankind. World I, World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam. Wars and post-war eras accompanied by the utter obliteration of hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese by the atomic bomb, the gruesome deaths of 6 million Jews in the holocaust, Stalin’s murder of perhaps as many as 20 million of his people; Pol Pot’s Cambodian genocide of the cultural elite, and a death count of nearly 600,000 Americans in four wars combined. (Shockingly, that is roughly the number of people who succumbed to America's Civil War in the 1860s.)
Twenty-first-century America opened with an egregious act of terrorism –the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the death of over 3,000 American citizens followed by twenty years of war with terrorist aggressors in Iraq and Afghanistan and the death of over 7,000 US soldiers. During this time, our lives seemed unfazed, at least for those of us not directly involved in combat. Economic prosperity, which is the only "true" barometer of American health and happiness, rose for a time. But twenty-five years down the road, we have become aware of societal undercurrents that have only recently surfaced with a vengeance: anti-democratic, racist, politically divisive, classist, xenophobic (angry, hateful, even cruel for cruelty's sake).
In the last decade or so, my idealism-turned-cynicism has been eclipsed by utter disbelief and profound despair. I am not alone in this. My fellow baby boomers have been crushed by the blatant dismemberment of a generation’s hard-won legislation for social change and world-wide humanitarian aid for those in greatest need. In looking back, I think I never really let go of the youthful idealism that launched me into adulthood. Now in later life, as I reflect on my long search for "meaning" through immersion in our nation's history, I realize that there have always been dark and divisive undercurrents, and they arise out of a single, unresolved emotion: fear. And fear is not an American phenomenon. It is global. It is what drives the human psyche and its beliefs, behaviors, social structures, civilizations, technological advances, war machines and ecological exploitation of the planet.
It’s not too far a reach to pinpoint humanity’s descent into fear back to its biblical or mythological creation stories. Certainly, Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden put humanity on a trajectory of separation anxiety and fear of extinction from day one. And Cain who threw the first stone, brother against brother, put humanity on a course of habitual internecine conflict and endless warfare.
At this point in time, human beings are surrounded by fear of what is, what might be, and of each other. The tentacles of fear invade every aspect of our existence. In a sense, our focus on fear creates our reality of enemies, disease, illness, and disaster. We live in expectation of catastrophe and create institutions, national boundaries, preventative strategies, warning systems and military stockpiles to keep us safe and at-the-ready.
Healthcare, dominated by Big Pharma and genetic profiling not only allows us to treat or prepare for the “possibility” of devastating illnesses, but to anticipate it. We put so much focus on disease we create more bodily dysfunction than we cure. We anticipate aging as a death sentence. Society’s fear of death and the prevalence of death denial keep us desperately trying to outrun the inevitable.
History continues to be made. We divide the past into neat historical eras or decades or label each gen-eration (XYZ and so on). But who is really making history and who is recording history. In truth, at this very moment it feels as if we are at the “beginning of the end” of history. It is an era, period, moment in time in which history is unravelling. We thought history was a progressive, linear thing. But it is not.
There are those that say that things must get much worse before they get better. And here we are. The beginning of what I call “The Unravelling.” America is a perfect case in point. We thought that our institutions, our cultural diversity, our values and our unflagging spirit of freedom, even our geographical separation would keep us safe. But the underlying current of fear that led our forefathers to construct the institutions that would protect us from enemies both outside and within is now visible for all the world to see.
The unraveling has begun. The fix will not be greater separation from our enemies or bolstering existing institutions. It will be an unraveling that will very likely bring generations of strife and diminished capacity until we find ourselves, not as one of many nations, but as one of many creatures of the earth and (perhaps ultimately) as energetic beings that will find their way back to knowing who and what we are. It will be a transformation of the idea and the experience of physicality and the return to the conscious energy of self and Source. With aging comes greater spiritual awareness. But for now, the unraveling begins.
Thanks for Listening.
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What I’ve Lived and Learned About History and Its Inevitable End