I was reminded to chase girls, drink booze, try pot, buy a dashiki, try to grow a fro, and to be millitant even when being civil was more profitable. This was the black pressure. My architecture class was as free wheeling as I expected, the art history class begain the white pressure. The first day till the last they did their best to tell me Greek culture and building was the beginning of civilization. I could not bear it, not hear it, not believe it. That history implied way more than it was explaning. I look back and I can see the questions I had deep inside were preventing me from engaging into that deception and manipulaton called their spin on history. I could not accept the white pressure because the black pressure was a pre-existing condition.
The whole white pressure thing was we had to drop our thing and pickup their thing in order to be considered for inclusion. Our realization was that they imagined themselves as the start of things, they also imagine our following their lead and culture, we will be like them, no different, a tourtured and twisted imagination even they can't accept. The pre-existing condition they ignore is that we were the origin, the beginning, the start, they came out from us and they learned from us. It is a rude assumption to claim origins just because you have progressed from what you were taught. And to efface history and tell it to your kids as the truth is lying. Your kids know no difference, they believe the lies with zeal, as truth.
How is this important? We talk diversity today, our latest attempt to embrace the good and the bad and set aside the ugly. The damaging things each culture did to each other in history, the hero/villians, the forced integrations, the exteriminations, the exclusions, it is impossible to face each other with a clear conscience along the lines of culture, religion, politics or other human institutions. We diversly say today "I am an individual and not personally responsible for the damage cause to any group and can not be held accountable for the actions or results of my family, race or any other designation defining man." "Who I am is consequencial, I am a self realizing entity, born on top of a past I did not chose, it's not my fault!"
No sweat, but I partly agree, but who did you learn from? What did you learn? Where were you inserted into life? How are you moving among others? Being effected? Influencing others? None is perfect, none is innocent. In your measure of life and understanding, where do you stand? Who is measuring, judging, accounting?
This is all why it is easy for me to say "what if". And why people are still able to change reality. Yeah yeah I know, only a Sith lord deals in absolutes. LOL
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