B is for Books
In many places in the world, with September comes the start of another school year. These are always days of mixed emotion - the children are sorry to see summer end, and the parents wish the tiring demands of school and schedules weren't about to be thrust upon the family once again. Last week in the small Russian city of Beslan, all of those petty concerns were put aside just minutes into the new academic year when a school there was overtaken and held hostage to prove to the world that a group of armed adults could indeed take a school hostage by showing up and rushing in, armed to the teeth with bombs and weaponry. Of course as we all know, The Armed Ones had a political and military objective but as events unfolded, that message became somewhat obfuscated by the bloodied and charred bodies of the dead. Because after the take over, Beslan also turned out to be the place where hostage takers, assorted Russian military forces, and local armed citizenry proved that nothing good comes of fighting to the death in and around helpless terrified children and helpless terrified adults. Now a week later on a sunny September morning just north of Silicon Valley, I'm staring at my keyboard and wondering how the peoples of the earth move forward from here. I have a good friend who's quite the history buff and he thinks my reaction to the news from Beslan is ridiculous. Of course, his reaction to my reaction is not new. He has frequently thought that my repeated response to front-page news over the last several years has been ridiculous. This event or that event is not the end of the world, he always reminds me. Man's inhumanity to man (and women and children) is as old as the human race and not something that should be catching any of us by surprise. Consider the Romans, he always says - or the Soviet Gulags, or Greek slavery, or Ghengis Kahn, or the Aztecs, or the Khmer Rouge, or Columbine, or the Nazis, or Abu Ghraib, or Andersonville, or Battan, or the Sudan, or 9/11, or the systematic slaughter of native peoples in any land when a more sophisticated, more technologically advanced people arrive and decide to make that land their own. Just open any history book and you'll see it's true. According to my learned friend, history continues to prove that although we're many millennia into the era of recorded history, man is still just a heartbeat away from his bestial tendencies, his ability to enjoy the exercise of cruelty on the weak and defenseless, and his need to shed blood to guarantee that his gene pool, his people, his religion, and most importantly, his political opinion/party/persuasion rule the day. So go take a walk, enjoy the sunshine, and plan on the fact that the sun will rise tomorrow. Yep, his is the long view of history, the distanced, antiseptic view, and certainly the reassuring one on a sunny September morning here just north of Silicon Valley. Man has always been cruel. He was cruel yesterday. He's cruel today. He'll be cruel tomorrow. Go take a walk and enjoy the sunshine. Whatever. So let me return again to the odyssey of my middle child. As the children of Beslan, stripped down to their soiled undies, bled, fled and died - my own flesh and blood was travelling through Cambodia on the back of a vegetable truck. She is, as I've said before, en route to Kenya where she and some other foolish young idealist plan to be in Mombassa soon to receive and distribute 25,000 books to local libraries who are, by all reports, suffering from a "book famine." Apparently, it's slim pickings in the libraries in that region of the world and for some reason my daughter and her friends have decided to turn their boundless energies to attempting to alleviate that problem. That's the cheery way of looking at it. For her mother hunkered down over a keyboard in sunny Silicon Valley, there's an alternative way of looking at things. From here, the world looks like a friggin' dangerous place full of a whole host of committed, driven zealots who want to make their square meter of the planet better by wounding or eliminating the committed, driven zealots who inhabit the next square meter over. How is my daughter going to be kept safe if she insists on wandering beyond the borders of her assigned square meter? How is she going to be protected if she refuses to acknowledge my historian friend's rather matter-of-fact evaluation of the world as a place populated by cruel, power-hungry animals? Let's see, I think the answer is ... she's not going to be kept safe. She doesn't want to be kept safe. She's not going to be protected. She doesn't want to be protected. Her group is exposed, vulnerable, and open to attack from a host of mad men (and women) who would destroy some lives to make other lives better. A host of mad men (and women) who come in all flavors, nationalities, ethnicities, religious faith traditions, and socio-economic backgrounds. Her group at this moment doesn't care. They have decided that the only way to live is to try to give. And there's nothing more to it. I could go on, but why bother? The voice of my daughter and the voice of my historian friend are only two voices among billions. And each in their own way is dealing with their own unique perceptions of the world. My daughter thinks books are important and she wants to do something about it. My historian friend thinks books are important and he wants to do something about it. My daughter thinks books will make the future better. My historian friend thinks books will shield us from the present and the past. As the new school year dawns, as the sun rises yet again, as billions of students worldwide report to class, and as the precious babies of Beslan go to their final reward, I hope my daughter and my historian friend are both right. Books will be the answer. Sometime soon.
September 9, 2004 Peggy Aycinena owns and operates EDA Confidential. She can be reached at peggy@aycinena.com
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