A year has passed. At midnight, a day a go, we
drew a line and celebrated its ending. We dropped a ball. We popped opened a
few bottles of varying color and content and toasted the birth of 2012. In that
moment we reflected. What was 2011? Time magazine dubbed it the year of the
protestor. If we where to flip through the snap shots of a year past we would
find some simple truth in this decree. We would find photos from home of rural
Tea Party members and urban youths attempting to occupy the minds of Middle
America and the offices of Wall Street Respectively.
If
we turned our minds eye, instead, towards the wider world we would see images
of dark faced Arabs taking to streets to overthrow aging dictatorships both
communist and colonial in nature; People who not quite like ourselves sought
not economic equality or individual dignity but instead basic human rights.
They called for Freedom from police brutality, Freedom of expression, Freedom
to realize their own individual destinies.
We
find this in photographs of hundreds, then thousands, then millions of
protestors carrying green banners pouring into the streets of Cairo. We find it
in grainy still images smuggled out of Syria of innocent protestors being cut
down by pro-government forces. But what is even more striking are the images we
don’t see. There are no photographs of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in
the streets of rural Tunisia. Although many of us may still recall the Associated
Press correspondent Malcolm Browne’s photograph of Thích Quảng Đức, a
Vietnamese Buddhist monk, burning himself to death in Saigon in 1963.[1]
Some will recall it as members of a generation who lived through and witnessed
the end of the Vietnam War. Others still younger, who have lived through the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will recall it as the cover of Rage Against the
Machine’s 1992 album. A few members of that former generation are still alive,
and together many of us have bared witness to photographs of the ‘final’
American convoy pouring out of Iraq and back into Kuwait.
‘Final’
is the key word here. Those of the former generation still recall the final
moments of the war in Vietnam. Helicopters lifting hundreds then thousands of
American diplomatic personal and Vietnamese refugees from the rooftops of
Saigon and depositing them upon U.S. Naval vessels. Helicopters being pushed
off of carriers to make room for an endless stream of refugees and hundreds more
huddled on the rooftops of Saigon awaiting a rescue that would not come. The
Pairs Peace Accord had been signed in 1973. American troops had all but left
the country. Two year later Saigon was falling. For two years the war continued
on without America’s direct presence on the ground. Now we slip quietly from
Iraq. Leaving behind thousands of American contractors and many others in the
heart of Baghdad. I dare not draw any comparison between these to starkly
different wars, but we must wonder now about what images will pour from the
city of Baghdad in the years to come.
All
ready there are images, mostly unseen by Americans, of Buddhist monks
committing the heretical act of self-immolation in Tibet. Protestors. Soldiers.
Refugees. Human beings. As the Dalai Lama points out there is so much courage
to be found in these images, even in those actions of a desperate few that we
find so deplorable. His holiness captures the question we must all ask now, in
a recent interview with the BBC.
“There
is courage - very strong courage. But how much effect? Courage alone is no
substitute. You must utilize your wisdom… Many Tibetans sacrifice their lives.
Nobody knows how many people killed and tortured - I mean death through
torture. Nobody knows. But a lot of people suffer…”
But
how much effect?[2] In
1966 the images of burning monks and nuns in the City of Saigon made the front
pages of newspapers like The Morning Record.[3] They
protested war profiteering on the part of the US. The effect may have been the
end of US military involvement. It was not the end of war itself for the
Vietnamese or for humanity as a whole. It did not bring an end to Communism.
That nine lettered word, that in Ginsberg’s account, was “used by inferior
magicians with the wrong alchemical formula for transforming earth into gold…”[4]
So
what has ended? Where, when, how, why did it end? Where do we draw the line? Is
the death of Mohamed Bouazizi the end of a human life or the birth of a
thousand protestors? What can we make of
our own consciousness of the year that has come to pass? John Gardner defines
consciousness as ‘the state in which not all atoms are equal. In corpses,
entropy has won. The brain and the toenails have equal say.’ In such no two
images are equal. And in the end the government’s of old and the protestors of
tomorrow may have equal say yet.
My
mind wonders back to my old college haunts and the classrooms where I first
read about the Ship of Theseus. A thought experiment as old as recorded
history, where we imagine a wooden sailing ship where each piece of timber is
slowly replaced over time in till no scrap of the original vestal remains. Does
it remain the same ship? Is two thousand and eleven the same year if we remove
the images of protestors from across the globe? Yet what would we replace them
with? Images like that of the ‘Vancouver kissing couple?’ A photograph that almost
all members of western society have viewed and determined now to be an
orchestrated and not truly authentic event. A volume could be written on that
photo alone…
In
the end we must simply remember that Theseus’s Ship is still no matter what
Theseus’s Ship. Just as 2011 is still, in the consciousness of many, the year
of the protestor no matter what time does to erase the images and memory of
their courage and resolve. It’s that pivotal fact of ownership that makes a
year, a life, a consciousness what it is. We define a year not by when it ends
but by what parts of it we hold on to and what parts we let go.
So a
year passes and we hold on to what we can and we let go of what we must…
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