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Whimsy?

June 20, 2024   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

There is a wonderful and now award-winning website called the World History Encyclopaedia (WHE).

It welcomes new attendees online, as one might say, to come into its stories for free. These are extremely well-researched, very erudite individual features about individuals, specific events, often some form of aggression or a time of invasion for its own sake and subsequent “war” if an invasion was not accepted with compliant reconciliation. Also, there are biographies of very many historical figures: back hundreds of years, right up to the mid-20th Century. As war dominates our human history so too does it appear on the WHE pages.

Recently and very briefly, this was a conversation of my eavesdropping, between two women… “All our history has been defined by the wars at the time,” said one. “Just imagine that’s how it has been: that every so-frequently, a “movement forward” was defined by brutality and death.”

This conversation was brief because it defined our history so succinctly and with such stark reality: the other lady agreed with, “What if we had just passed on the wars and planted crops and talked to each other….”

Taking history, a passion of mine in high school, I was bored by the list of wars, used as they are retrospectively, to mark what else was happening in the world. Actually, I should have been more appalled than bored but they were presented with numbers and cool statistics and political consequences of moving borders about, changing the nationality of such-and-such a parcel of land, without asking those who lived there if they minded.

If they did mind, did protest, there could always be more war to subjugate them.

The problem with the curriculum is that it accepted war as a normal way of changing or settling matters that either had no need of changing or that could have been managed with diplomacy.

Silly thought, really, when the basis for war is largely how profitable it is. Never mind the dead and damaged – all that is collateral damage for a “higher cause.” I remember a well-informed gentleman being interviewed on the CBC, commenting, “Well, there is no notion of peace in the Middle East. War is so profitable.”

Cold chill down the spine. That is what it’s all about. 

History is a list of mad men, well, and a couple of women, Queens mainly, all of them born to power or lustful, driven, intelligent and of overwhelming charisma to be able to grasp power – madness anyway that could infect whole nations with their madness. Like a disease or a mass injection.

What does happen to a map of people, a majority percentage of a nation’s citizens, that they will buy into stories that are simply not true and those who recognize the lies are dismissed by the power promoting the falsehoods with new embellishments, new nonsense? How are so many people motivated to wear symbols and eventually uniforms; how are they persuaded to inflict the ultimate harm, slashing without thoughts of guilt or remorse?

We could have passed on war, planted crops and talked to each other. 

Sometimes, an aged person sits back and reviews their life and judges it. What was useful about that life where other people benefited? When was time well spent? Opportunities won; chances missed…

How old are we now – 65,000 years? Do we as a whole category reflect on who we have been; on how much we have evolved – or are we the same creature painting horses on cave walls and riding them into dire battles because a powerful person conned us into giving them a more powerful throne? 

We have conquered the world – if we survive to write history books about this era, it is and will be called The Anthropocene, the era in which humans have had a substantial impact on this planet.

Being us, it doesn’t spell good news for the planet. Not much is said about war’s harm to the environment, added to our many very harmful industries.

Scrooge’s visiting Christmas ghosts convinced him absolutely that we are never too old to change. Really.

It is very late in the day for change but Scrooge was in his latter years by the time he wanted to save Tiny Tim and share a gin punch with Cratchit. His future history, he believed, “can change and will change!”

So can we, but this is an emergency in which we must stop believing the lies that have brought our precious earth almost to the point of no return.

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