cktimes.ca Archives for Cultural Musings on Chatham-Kent
Cultural Musings on Chatham-Kent
Arts, culture and heritage appreciation can lead to understanding
Tuesday, September 17, 2002
This past week has brought a seemingly endless and, often times, painful array of return visits to September 11th, 2001. It seemed that one could not turn on the television, radio or open a newspaper or magazine without those horrifying, surrealistic images of errant planes seemingly gone mad with evil intent crashing into icons of American culture.Those of us who live in North America will live with those images as a part of our subconscious for the rest of our lives. However, it was the messages imbedded in these days of remembrance that caused us to pause and attempt to put things into perspective and wonder, aloud, about what have
we really have learned in the last three hundred and sixty five days. After all, should not history, even recent history, serve to instruct, guide and influence our future?
Has it taught us to be a more caring, understanding, compassionate and loving civilization? We do not think that has been the case. In fact, this past year has seen the United States ( with, for the most part, Canadian as well as world support) bent on the hunting down and annihilation of terrorists believed responsible for the horrors of September 11th and the subsequent killing of thousands of Afghanis with the vast majority of them being as innocent as those people who were killed on September 11th in the United States. It started a wave of destruction that is far from being over. If anything, this past year has made us into a world even more full of hate , suspicion and revenge than it was before this date. This view of life is not only limited to our American friends as our own “Toronto the Good” has had hate crimes ( racism, harassment and vandalism) against Muslims and Arabs increase dramatically ( from 204 to 338) in the last year.
Has it made us more aware and sympathetic of other tragedies in the world and the loss and destruction that others in the world have experienced, continue to experience and will , no doubt, suffer in the future? We do not, unfortunately, believe this to be the case either. North America and especially the United States continues to live in an intolerant existence circumvented by their own concerns and almost totally blind to any other “world” other than their own narrow one. Many other tragedies have occurred in other places in the world with greater loss of life and yet we, in North America, seem to discount those deaths, ignore them, or somehow regard those lives as less important than North American ones and maybe of less value.
Have we as North Americans assumed any responsibility for what happened on September 11th? We would like to hope that this has happened but we do not honestly think that this has been the case. This does not mean that we should excuse these misguided terrorists who so heartlessly killed innocent victims but it does mean that we at least stop and pause to consider the circumstances, the deep seated feelings and the history that led others in the world to despise, distrust and loathe the West so much that they would take such drastic action. It sometimes appears to us that, at least in the United States, this type of dialogue, reflection and discussion is strongly discouraged and seen as something akin to treason. Until we, in North America, can honestly come to terms with these kinds of things and examine our moral fabric, our responsibilities to the world and make honest attempts at “walking a mile in someone else’s shoes”, then the deaths of September 11th are even more tragic and sadly, as history so clearly tells us, doomed to be repeated with even more death and destruction.
If the many lives lost on September 11th are to have some lasting, living memorial then we need to take this time of remembrance and reflection and come to terms with the fact that we, in North America, need to become a more patient, more understanding, more compassionate, more concerned and a less greedy and a less self-possessed group of people. We need to become more aware and better informed about the hopes, dreams, aspirations and problems of real people throughout the world and a little less preoccupied with shallow pop culture icons and self-absorbed professional athletes and mindless sporting and entertainment spectacles.
We need to divorce ourselves from macho, right wing, anti-intellectual leaders like George Bush who blatantly used September 11th to advance his continuation of further death and destruction in Iraq. We need to shun those political leaders closer to home who openly espouse anti-intellectualism and who make greed and power ends to be achieved at any cost.
Maybe now is the time to place our efforts on more universal values that will allow us to become a kinder, gentler , more compassionate and more understanding group of individuals. Maybe now is the time to reflect on how little we as a world have achieved through “the might makes right” philosophy and the bullying techniques that have, for so many years, dominated our lives from business to recreation. Maybe it is time to value our intellectual side, our thoughtful nature, our creative side and our charitable nature.
Maybe it is time to start to actively promote, pursue and value the arts, culture and history of not only our own country nor only North America but also the entire world. Maybe it’s time to actually embrace in its entirety the concept that we truly do live in a “global village” and that we need to know not only our own history but that of the entire world. Maybe it’s time to celebrate, appreciate and make an attempt to understand the arts, culture and history of other countries as well as our own for it’s often through a country’s arts, culture and heritage that we gain a true and deep understanding of others.and their hopes, desires, fears, passions as well their anger and frustrations.
Let us all use this time of reflection surrounding September 11th as a time to redirect our focus and to alter old out-dated views that no longer reflect the New World order. If we can make even small moves in those directions, then just maybe we will never have to be witness to other horrors rivaling or surpassing those that have inhabited our darkest nightmares and haunted our daily lives for what seems a lifetime but what is in reality only a mere year. After all, there are so many things that can be acted out upon the world stage other than death, destruction and intolerance.
Jim and Lisa Gilbert are local, national and international award winning educators and historians.
