Rebecca Drouilhet
Picayune, Mississippi, USA
I have an announcement to make: It’s the end of the line for idiotkind. The Civil War ended 157 years ago, and if you can’t understand that, get off my train. I’m going on without you. We need to leave our ancestors in their historical time. Some in our society are trying to resurrect the Confederacy and its symbols, not to honor their ancestors and to learn from them, but to build new nightmares, using the worst of the past to create bizarre new mutations with the potential to destroy the last 157 years of progress toward a more equitable society. Their project has the potential to engulf the vibrant present and create a horrific future, not only for those who were disadvantaged at the time of the Confederacy, but also for the heirs of the Confederacy themselves. Those heirs need to go into the future disentangled from the tentacles of a past that no longer serves them or their society and which deprives them of the chance to go forward, making new choices and entering the future. And we need to be shrewd enough to recognize that many who have no historical ties with the Confederacy are attempting to appropriate its culture and symbols for no good end.
We live in a world of increasing complexity. And because we have no historical precedents to guide us in how to choose wisely from the myriad and dangerous possibilities that now lie before us, we want to go back. We want to dig up the skeletons and taste the blood and the pain of our ancestors. We need catharsis and healing, but the past of a labor-intensive plow agricultural society may offer few clues to guide us. We are Hansel and Gretel in the woods, and the birds have eaten our breadcrumbs.
Some might perceive what I’m saying as an attack on people who have Confederate heritage, but that is not the case. Since our ancestors from that era died over a hundred years ago, none of their heirs now living have any way to go back in time and control a single choice their ancestors made, nor can they alter the context of the past or the social and economic systems that were in place at that time. To blame or scapegoat them for the sins of the past is unjust. To do so denies the reality that they, like everyone else, have undergone a tremendous amount of true social and economic change. They, like everyone else, deserve the right to go forward, living in their own times, capable of making different choices than their forbears. I post my theses now because it is imperative to turn the page of history, taking care to learn all we can from the past, while recognizing that we must go forward to create the future, no matter how frightening or disorienting that may be.
So today, I walk forward and nail my theses to an oak, unsure of where I am, in the wilderness of a new world without a road sign or a guidepost in sight.
Thesis One:
I declare war on Social Darwinism, a distortion of Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest, which misleads so many into thinking there is a superior race, thinking that has led to so much strife, cruelty and war for dominance over the whole species by a single tribe.
waxing moon
a lone wolf joins
the pack
Thesis Two:
I embrace the concept that cooperation and win/win situations make us all stronger.
Indra’s net
a single jewel
reflects us all
Thesis Three:
I declare that knowledge alone is not enough and that the advances we make in science and technology, including our social sciences, should be tempered by wisdom and compassion for ourselves as the whole of humankind and for all other living creatures.
new horizons…
finding the brain
in the heart
It’s growing dark, and I’m still a long way from my destination. I wonder how to get back home. But step by step my feet carry me forward, moving me along second by second into the future.