January 07, 2002
Black history
Remember black history of the world? There are too many to mention. I could tell such as: Nazis, Stalin, Tiananmen, Pearl Harbor, Atomic Bom's Day, Sept 11, and many too mention for local black days like: May 13 in Indonesia, Sept 30 of 65, etc. I think each country has their own black days. It's means, every age creates their own dark days, instead of glory and victory era they bought. It's acceptable that we creates it, maintains it, blames it, and then forget it. Unfortunately, it repeated endlessly, like Vonnegut said in Timequake or Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Fogetting. We then-and-always just very confused to think what is wrong nor the truth as well. Just simple like that.By fogetting such above, this is an idea from CSMonitor discussing that:
Attention, civilization-watchers out there. Score one for the New World in its competition with the Old: 5,000-year-old Caral, Peru, confirmed last year as the oldest city in the Americas (see story), has pushed estimates for the beginning of civilizations in the Americas back another thousand years.
But there is a poignancy to the story of this lost civilization, which Peruvians will surely feel as they grasp the significance of the findings of their compatriot, the archaeologist Ruth Shady Solís.
Civilizations, alas, rise and fall. They learn, and then they forget - or they fail to teach what they know to their younger generations.
The shifting positions of competing civilizations can lead to wrenching dislocations of humanity - as Americans are learning as they struggle to answer President Bush's question after Sept. 11, "Why do they hate us?" The Middle Eastern civilizations named the stars and taught the world to count with their Arabic numerals, much more sensible than Roman numerals, awkward as square wheels. These peoples do not like to be looked down on by the West.
- How civilizations learn, or forget
Posted at January 07, 2002 07:53 PM | Perspective
