HISTORY AND HISTORY

We just got back from our “25^th Anniversary European Tour”, which was marvelous.  I developed a bit of a pinched nerve in my neck, which affects my writing hand, so this will be short.  

One thing that impressed us was that the difficult side of history was not as hidden as it usually seems to be in the US.  We went to memorials for the Irish Famine (really a genocide, since Ireland exported food during the late 1840’s), the deportations under the Vichy government during WWII, Anne Frank’s house.  All very moving, and alongside beautiful buildings.

I’m thinking of the city where I live, Minneapolis, which obviously has a shorter history than Paris or Dublin. There are historical markers and historical buildings here, but, at least in my experience, you really have to seek out any memorials to the taking of Native lands, or the cruel treatment of immigrants or workers.  I wonder what a “Deportation Memorial” would look like here.

We have a reputation for being a-historical in this country, and that’s a loss.  It wasn’t always easy to hold in my mind that the great buildings in the square in Brussels—so beautiful in the day and unbelievable at night—were financed by the African slave trade, which was being remembered in an exhibit in the cathedral a few blocks away. But it was possible to see the beauty, to lament the great injustice, and to just be in there in the presence of both.

I want to live that tension wherever I am.

Be justice. Be beauty.

 
Patrick