Some folks worry about getting old. And they bemoan the passage of time.
But once upon a very long time ago, nobody kept track of the years. People in their nomadic, tribal clusters got up when the day dawned and went to sleep when it got dark. They did it every day, over and over again, until, inevitably, they didn’t awaken from their final sleep. Nobody ever worried about getting old; they just lived until they died, and the tribe moved on without them.
Even today in this wide world of ours, there are still countless numbers of people who don’t worry about aging. They live in unforgiving climes where their every effort is bent toward eking out a subsistence-level existence. Or they’re driven from their homes by ravaging armies—persecuted for their beliefs, their skin colour, their ethnic origins, and often enslaved by their captors. They, too, live only until death frees them, far too burdened to worry about the realities associated with getting old.
Yet here are we, inured from such extreme conditions—secure, some of us, in our developed, civilized world, inundated by the availability of all the essentials and luxuries we might desire—and what do we do? We worry about getting old.
Not all of us, of course. Many young people appear to have the same nonchalant, carefree attitude I probably had at their age—back when immortality was a given. The halcyon days of youth seemed destined to last forever. Only old people were old.
Others of us, the more elderly, have learned a sterner truth. Youth lasts only until it’s over, only until our bodies begin to betray us. The rosy morning of youth gives way, grudgingly, to a more austere noontime of life, and then, inexorably, to a deepening dusk we all are destined to enter.
Some folks accept that truth more gracefully than others, some more stoically, some more fatalistically.
But some, of course, do not accept it at all. In the words of the poet, they rage, rage against the dying of the light. Nips and tucks; silicone, botox, collagen, and dye; enhancements and reductions; diets and purging; even exercise—all undertaken by men and women in a fruitless pursuit of everlasting youth.
Why is this so, I wonder, here in our world of plenitude? Well, perhaps it’s because we have become obsessed with measuring time. After all, time’s passing itself is neither our friend nor our enemy. It’s just there, it’s always been there, and it will forever be there. So, I’ve come to believe it’s the keeping track of time that plagues us, wreaking havoc on our youth, eventually forcing us to an acceptance of the stark reality that we are going to get old. And we are going to die.
But remember, we are the first cohort of people since the dawn of time who has ever had the luxury of worrying about that.
Historians play a significant role in describing the thin veneer of civilization under which we live, in that their stories of our past colour the perception of our present and shape the direction of our future. But the history of which they write—that is, the actual unfolding of events—comes to us in three broad forms: 1) the unvarnished facts, the scarcest type; 2) the more palatable account-of-record, the most frequent type; and 3) the revisionist version, the most recent and pernicious type.
Take this example of the first type, the actual events. A young boy, often bullied at school, brings his new yo-yo to the schoolyard. While showing it off proudly to his friends, he is accosted by a bigger boy who takes the yo-yo, dazzles the assembled kids with a flourish of tricks, then claims it for his own. To forestall any backlash, the bigger boy gives the smaller boy his old yo-yo, along with a threat that he will be beaten if he complains. The smaller boy, unhappily accepting his lot, would likely write the history of events like this.
The second type, a more palatable account if the bigger boy writes the story, might read like this. A young boy, often bullied at school, brings a new yo-yo to the schoolyard as a gift for the bigger boy who, he hopes, will protect him from his tormentors in exchange for the gift. The bigger boy graciously accepts the new yo-yo, agrees to defend the smaller boy, and in a spirit of generosity, presents him with his old yo-yo. The smaller boy gratefully accepts his lot.
Both these versions take on added import if I mention that the smaller lad is an Indigenous boy from the rez, or a Black boy from the wrong side of the tracks, while the bigger boy is the scion of an influential White family from the better part of town.
The third type of history-writing, the revisionist version, might present the incident like this. A White boy who brings his new yo-yo to school to show it off to his friends notices an Indigenous boy, or perhaps a Black boy, eyeing the yo-yo enviously. Being a compassionate soul, the bigger boy generously gives his old yo-yo to the smaller kid, who is overjoyed to accept it from his munificent benefactor.
These made-up examples are just that, intended to illustrate the differences among the three versions of history we encounter. But only the first example is a true account of what actually transpired.
I—like most of you, I suspect—grew up being taught the second type of history at school, the palatable account-of-record. I learned, for instance, that Columbus discovered the Americas in 1492, and that great European nations such as England, France, and Spain undertook to spread the Christian gospel to the heathens who inhabited those vast, new lands. I was taught that Christian evangelizers, in their zeal to spread their religion and culture, gathered Indigenous children in schools far from family and home to provide them an education.
I did not learn in school that the original inhabitants had lived on those lands for millennia before the arrival of the White colonizers, nor did I learn that the invaders brought disease and death to the original peoples whose gold and furs they coveted. I did not learn in school about the horrors of residential schools for Indigenous children, nor about the treaties our government agreed to and then broke. Those learnings came much later.
That more palatable version of history also taught me in school that anti-Semitism was an integral part of the Kulturelle Überzeugungen of the wicked Nazi regime during WW II, and that the Japanese devils waging unprovoked war in the Pacific were spawned by an evil, expansionist empire that had to be destroyed. Both these facts were undoubtedly true.
But I did not learn in school that my own country, in a burst of anti-Semitic fervor, turned away a boatload of Jewish refugees in 1939, people fleeing the Nazis. Nor did I learn of the internment camps in my country to which Japanese-Canadian citizens were exiled during the years 1942-1949, their homes and possessions stripped from them. Those learnings, too, came later.
The revanchistes among us, those who would revise our history, try to tell us now that things like this did not happen—or if they did, it was for the best of reasons. They tell us the people making the decisions in such matters were ‘men of their times’ acting under the moral imperatives of the day, and should not be caviled or condemned by woke commentators holding them to account under today’s standards, standards which have changed radically over the intervening years. These revisionists, it seems, don’t want our children to learn unsavoury truths from our history, lest that knowledge corrupt the pristine past they prefer to present.
The problem is, although neither the palatable or revisionist versions of history accurately reflect what actually transpired, they can and do obscure or even alter the truth, affecting our perception and understanding of past events—and thus, perhaps, shaping our future actions.
As Winston Churchill famously wrote, Those who fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it. His countryman and frequent foil, George Bernard Shaw, wrote, We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.
Regardless of which of these men is closest to the truth, what I have learned is that our history-of-record is, for the most part, what the powers-that-be in our society want it to be. Moreover, that record can change to accommodate the whims and needs of the present realities as perceived by those powerful influencers. We are not, for the most part, presented with the unvarnished facts from our history. And that being so, it is not possible that our present and future behaviours can be shaped for the better by learning from our past.
tallandtruetales 