Statues, sound bites and blogs

There has been a lot of attention on statues over the past few weeks. It is good that we have the discussions we have about statues and that many must come down. I'm happy to see racist/divisive statues removed. Personally I'd also remove statues that glorify war or conflict. In fact, the only statues that I might leave standing are a representation of a person on their grave which simply says "here lies a good person."   Whether racist or divisive, all statues have the same problem; viz. they don't tell the entire story and can be quite misleading.  Even a plaque, which I feel far superior, is limited by the amount of information its space allows. Frequently that isn't nearly enough to really tell the story, and people are generally too lazy to seek out more information.  

     Statues, plaques, etc., were the means of universal communications to our predecessors. Our sound bites, video clips and blogs are our current means, and they have the same limitations. They show only one minute part of the story.  For example, the statue of Andrew Jackson. Wow, does it make him look impressive. It doesn't tell the rest of the story about how he cheated, killed, defied the Supreme Court and stole the land of the Native Americans who helped him win a war. It doesn't tell you that he was the worst thing to happen to the US until 2016. 

     I must admit to disliking sound bites and video clips. I took you-tube off my phone. I want to read accounts, opinions and facts so that I can think, reread, ponder, reread, form a visual images or opinions and then reread.  I want to see the whole picture, or at least enough of it that I can learn where to go to get the rest of the story. 

     Case in point: Oct 19, 1969.  As a graduate student, I drove a bus load of college students to the Washington DC anti-war demonstration. There were over 500,000 of us there. The sound bites weren't going to include the organizers tell new arrivals how to stay out of trouble, they were going to focus on every nasty thing anyone said on either side. That's sensationalism and that's what keeps the ratings up.  Pictures and videos were going to be of those students who broke the march rules and tried to stop traffic or damage property.  They weren't going to be of the cops calmly redirecting traffic around the trouble makers or the marchers distancing themselves from those who wanted to throw stones.  Pictures definitely were not going to show the DC cop soaking his feet in the reflecting pool at the end of a long day with students skinny-dipping nearby.  

     I don't really like what we call "blogs". Have you ever read directions for writing a blog that will get picked up by a search engine? It is basically writing techniques that are antithetical to good writing skills. I avoid calling anything I write a "blog". To me that's almost an insult.  Some actually argue for longer texts but most say that you want to keep the length down because people won't read more than a minute or two. Evidently that's around 800 words. You see blogs or news articles that tell you how long it will take you to read it. The blog has become an over-sized plaque; insufficient to get the entire story or message across. 

     I don't know how my anthropologist family and friends feel about it, but my historian Father found all this appalling. It is hard enough to glean the truth of an event or social situation studying piles of books and hundreds of documented references. I have an anthropologist friend who often laughs about the piles of books in her study and how she is receiving more each day.  These are the tools by which she learns of people, places and times she can't visit in person. How does one expect to really learn anything from a short video or 800 word "blog"?  You can have a picture of Donald Trump standing by the Mexican border with his hands outstretched. You and I know that he isn't saying "give me your tired, your poor, your  huddled masses yearning to breathe free,..."  Quite the contrary. But how is that going to look to someone who hasn't lived through Donald Trump's reign? 

     Going back long before I started going to school people called subjects like history the boring, egghead subjects. I'll agree that there are teachers who can make a class on the Kama Sutra boring, but that doesn't make the book or the subject boring. I've also witnessed lecturers who can make an obscure historical place or event so interesting that the listeners go away wanting to learn more. 

     I hated having to give up my books when I hit the road as a nomad. Behind my desk were hundreds of reference and professional books. Beside the chair where I would end the day reading and sipping Irish were probably two hundred books on a myriad of subjects. 

     I guess I must admit that while I was labeled by my profession as a psychotherapist, my real love was as an amateur philosopher, historian or anthropologist. During the short period of life where I was an advisor to doctoral students, I actually envied the research they were doing.  The result of this is that I truly and sincerely fear for our society that doesn't want to read, can't write a complete sentence, and wants everything in short sound bites, 800 word blogs or 280-500 character tweet. I can't help but to fear that if we don't study, read and understand why we are tearing down statues, etc., that we will indeed repeat the history that put them there.