depends on the lens

 

complexity in history

What is history?

I've loved to look back,

to study how the world used to come at us,

what are the lenses through which to see the past?

as we seek to grok just what happened,

just what people thought,

which choices were available,

which choices were chosen,

I hope for lessons that can erupt,

full-blown, out of our forehead,

but I know that such epiphany can be 

as enigmatic as Delphi,

a common trope is that returning soldiers from Vietnam

were verbally assaulted upon their return,

accused of being "baby killers,"

did that happen?

I'm sure it did, sometimes,

yet how universal seems questionable to me,

such verbal assaults never happened around me,

nor were they in my brother's experience,

he who was drafted into Vietnam in 1968,

he who never wanted to be in Vietnam,

he who spent his last years

striving to understand what happened

and to move forward into how he should feel about it all,

we don't like indeterminacy,

the frustrating gray,

like days that aren't either sunny or raining,

if we seek to make an empathic leap into history,

we should work to understand complexity,

the muddle, the din of countless voices

that can confuse our understanding,

I work to grasp that those in the past were like us,

doing the best they can,

and not gifted with knowing how it will all turn out,

what might be obvious to us now

might then have been indecipherable,

overwhelmed by the reality they lived,

we can see how it turned out

and we judge them for not prophesying rightly,

I don't want to whitewash history,

but I am still daunted by how hard the challenge is

of seeing and expressing the complexity of being there,

at the time, and understanding the cusps that called to all,

nuance can easily get lost, ambiguity forgotten,

and gray can overcome black and white

and swamp us with obfuscation,

we then lose determinacy,

in such turmoil we might gain the uncomfortable wisdom

of realizing our heart's reality is black and white,

and the world we have to deal with

easily slips into the gray.

by Henry H. Walker

March  18, ‘25