Personal Meditation No. 31

"Say, what do I care about Napoleon? What do we care about what they did 500 or 1,000 years ago? I don't know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across and I don't care. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today."

Embrace the Within.

There is a lot of need for truth in our lives that we’re just not getting. And as you begin to really examine the traditions and history imparted to you at an early age, those traditions and that history turns to a lot of bunk.

So we often hear the adage that not learning history makes us repeat it, however, truly learning history makes us question its veracity. History is the story of the winners. And we tie a lot of emotional significance to winners and losers. We don’t want to identify with the losers. Just look at how sports fans take credit for a team’s victory but distance themselves from a loss. We have that sort of we-ness around our own history and tradition.

We’ve heard a lot of the last five years about fake news but not so much about how fake history is. And if the news is written by the winners as well, then just imagine the collection of that news into a history book.

I remember being a young teacher about two years or so into the profession and having the realization that the bombing of Japan in World War II was absent from the history book. Not even a mention of this atrocity. And I wonder how many other things have been and will continue to get glossed over in our history of tradition.

So, maybe Ford was right that tradition, that history is bunk. And maybe, just maybe, we should start taking our personal history a little more seriously than a collective history. I find a lot more truth in what I see as part of my life than I do in the stories of folks I never met. And if I care enough about me and my community, if I care enough about my neighbors and family, if I care about the world I choose to create, then maybe that history is more important and that tradition of the prehistoric storyteller is a better way to move forward?

We’d lose a lot but what would we gain?

I hope you find whatever you’re looking for. Have the day you want.