Perspectives in time

There’s been a lot happening. I suspect there may not be a coherent theme to this. Last night, I was on the phone with my mother, who was all hyped up about today. But for me it was still yesterday. It’s a strange conversation, when you are on the phone with tomorrow. In Hindi/Urdu, the same word – kaal - is used for yesterday as for tomorrow. Rushdie made fun of that in one of his novel, but last night, having the same word made sense. My tomorrow was her yesterday and yet we were occupying the same time, just separated by space.

Days run together and history repeats. Some days are unique for their occasions, but they all have resonance with other days. Just now, I watched Jesse Jackson be interviewed – introduced as the first African American to run for President. Obviously, the network was trying to pay homage to history. Unfortunately, it is no more true than the assertion that the US is the oldest and largest democracy in the world. Shirley Chisholm ran in 1972 and winning delegates in the primary process from a diverse base. Do we forget her because she was a woman? Or because it was over thirty years ago?

Is history truly so easy to forget? It doesn’t even have to be recent history for us to start whitewashing it. I remember being in Reno in August 2001. The headlines at the time were focused on where the Clinton surplus had gone. Nowadays, we blame the deficit on the wars – events forced on the US and beyond the control of the outgoing administration. Yet in August, there were no wars. Last year, we watched Israel start a war with Lebanon. Going back and reading the original UN documents at the time, it was evident that Israel daily violated Lebanese airspace, prior to their crying foul about Lebanese actions. Similarly, now we see the travesty in Gaza and it seems none of us remember that it was Israel that broke the ceasefire back in November.

I woke up Thursday to the news that the UN compound in Gaza had been bombed with white phosphorus. For years, accusations of using white phosphorus as a bomb rather than illumination has been made. Now it seemed like there was no denying. By the evening, the entire news cycle was dominated by the miracle on the Hudson. No one died in the miracle of the Hudson. It was a miracle, but how does that outweigh the horrors that define daily life elsewhere? One Israeli writer wrote about how she was more disturbed by sights of broken Starbucks windows, even as another commentator noted that apparently there are no “civilians” in Gaza and more than half of the dead and injured are women and children. “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” Memories run deep in some places – personal pain gets remembered, distant, other people’s pain fades. As Douglas Adams put it: SEP – someone else’s problem, visible only in the peripheries of your vision when you are momentarily distracted.

Maybe the trick is not to be linear. Maybe we do need to circle around as a society. Circling gives us time for reflection. To understand today, obviously we need to circle back to comprehend the true meaning of today. I suspect it means more to US Americans, since the onus of slavery resides in their history. In mine, the burden of the holocaust makes me sensitive to genocide.

While in Mexico, we went to Uxmal and Mani. Mani is one of those places where a lot of the Mayan codices were burned. Uxmal existed for close to 1000 years. History that was attempted to be erased is now a source of heritage and pride, as well as fueling the local economy. In medicine, local knowledge is being studied for new medicines.

So our tomorrows and yesterdays do run together. Maybe we should keep better track of our yesterdays to help understand our tomorrows. It’s all just a matter of understanding the true meaning of kaal. I was proud of the Vatican finally stepping up and naming Gaza the modern day equivalent of a concentration camp. After failing to speak out during the holocaust, they are not failing now. Maybe they know kaal. Will we as a society ever?