Through History Alone
Imagine a society with city streets devoted to higher consciousness and healing our humanity.
Institutions dedicated to the uncensored distillation of ideas and preservation of ancient teachings from bygone cultures.
Spaces where people could rejuvenate their life-force through various nondiscriminatory practices.
Imagine a culture where, instead of avenues of clothing shops pumping out fast fashion from the bones of starving nations, we had tree-lined boulevards with bookshops, each an expert on an aspect of knowledge that could be studied by anyone freely.
A world where art, science, and religion bunked together, creedlessly cross-pollinating, free from suspicion and fear-driven angst.
A planet encompassed by vast sacred sites where ecosystems were encouraged to prosper, free from diabolical human intervention.
Because I must have missed school the day they taught us about the twelve million slaves stolen from Africa in the name of democratic progress and Enlightenment.
Or that the founder of a country founded on the inherent equality of all beings, had himself human beings as property.
I must have called in sick the day they explained the decimation of the oldest surviving culture on this planet by corrupted aristocrats in Whitehall, wild with greed, looking to Terra Australis as an economic band-aid to a rampant crime problem, Ol' London town
Conveniently, culture decides which parts of its past it would like to discuss and which parts it would like to bury.
And we needn't dig too deep to find a children’s picture story book version of our past.
We learned of the glory of the Anzacs. The heroism. The seeds of a national identity born on those bloodied Turkish dunes.
Yet we were never taught that these brave young boys were tricked by savage, indifferent politicians into thinking war was the adventure of a lifetime and a debt to the motherland for ripping a rich land from the chained hands of an ancient, wise culture and telling them it was inhabited by savages.
Because, if we look closely, if we are honest with the inheritors of our society, perhaps we should teach our children how as a species we have murdered over a hundred million of our species in the last century alone, and how every day we kill more life on this planet than can truly be comprehended by any sane mind.
Perhaps we ought to tell them our education is filtered by a culture content to bury its shames. To hide, rather than admit, its failures.
For our schools teach us versions of history. Versions written by the inheritors of vested interests in deception.
We are obliged to educate ourselves and our children on the beauty and ugliness of the human condition, both the triumphs and sins of our collective past.
For it’s through truly digesting our history, digesting the horrors that our species is capable of, consciously seeking the root causes of our madness, and finding roads out of it together rather than running from our ugliness and lying to the youth that we can begin to create a more honest, peaceful world.
