Every once in a while amidst quick and lively conversation comes the sharing of our earliest memories. For many it is a day and a deep emotional response that goes with that day. For some it is the birth of a younger brother or sister and realizing that they are no longer the baby. For me it was November 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Yes, my earliest memory is watching the Berlin Wall come down. I know it may sound ridiculous, but it is true. It was a cold November, as I remember. During that time there was no complexity to the image and sound of people on a television screen striking at a wall covered with graffiti. My mother and father embraced each other casually on the couch as I was plopped down on the floor. As I watched in confusion over an image of exuberant people celebrating and crying, my mother did the same. For me it was just a newscast with no real meaning, but to my parents it was the end of an era of fear that they had always known. It was the beginning of something startlingly different. This political change, as quick and sudden as it came, just as quickly dissipated to the footnote in history that it has become, but for that day the geo-political order suddenly no longer made sense.
Winston Churchill once explained that “politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.”
I think this is telling. For those of us who love politics, see it in all of our human interactions and observations, remains the tragedy of knowing that there is always that unknown variable that can throw off all our predictions and assumptions. If there ever was a nebulous thing, politics would definitely qualify. Many predicted the collapse of the Soviet order prior to 1989, however many were also blindsided by the beautiful collapse of that red menace. It wasn’t until the storm began to settle that the political explanations arose, and the world once again made a little more sense. And in this end we find the value of politics. As complex and unpredictable as our lives are, comes the necessity of having a yard-stick, or box of tools to develop an answer to that seemingly impossible “why?” That is why I believe we have politics.
Indeed, there is the tool box to guide us through negotiations and making predictions, but how do we cope once these negotiations and predictions fail? We desperately want a reasoning and an answer. And for many, politics serves not only as an eloquent compass through the storm of domestic and international interactions, but also through the storm and confusion of human interactions.
-James V. Silva "Don't hate the media, become the media."--Jello Biafra |
