America’s Escape from Knowing
By Phil Rockstroh, March 28, 2011
Editor’s Note: For many of us, one of the regrets about dying is that we don’t get to see how things turn out. We must face the fact that we are allowed to view, personally, only a brief chapter of the human narrative. Through our imperfect knowledge of history, we can gaze back through the haze of time at how we as a people (or as a family) got here, but the future is the ultimate unknown.
That is the human condition – a mix of hope, awareness, regret and sometimes willful ignorance – a paradox that Phil Rockstroh confronts in this guest essay, which he dedicates to the memory of “my brave friend and gifted colleague, Joe Bageant, 1946-2011.”
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In Berlin, Germany, in early 1939, at Friedrichstrasse railway station, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, my grandmother placed my mother and her older sister, with a few family valuables sown into their clothing, on a Kindertransport bound for Great Britain.
,…,
My mother escaped Nazi Germany; my father was orphaned on an Indian res., left starving, on the doorstep of a church, during the Great Depression. My earliest memories involve the Civil Rights struggles roiling my native Birmingham, Alabama.
Then came the Vietnam War, Nixon, and Watergate. Next, arrived the backlash, in the form of Reaganism that since has diminished and degraded the nation.
Accordingly, I’ve never held any illusion that this world was not seeded with the potential of man-made tumult, stupidity, and tragedy.
