Veteran visitors of yesteryear will obviously be aware that to this site no longer gets updated. Once a surging spring the slow trickle of comment submission for moderating has also been reduced manifold. Though the occasional ones do manage to slip in, this precisely is the reason why I just had to post today. It is because of a challenging comment from yesterday and came to my attention whilst checking e-mail. Yes, I moderate comments, not to filter out dissenting or critical opinions, but the people who have taken to blogs to shamelessly promote their wares. So seeing that I am in the process of one of the tightest schedules ever, I thought to prove to myself and those who continue to follow this site that, YES; you can! If I can, You sure can too! Since I can write a few lines for the sake of putting up a post, you took can get started on something and it will be completed before you know it!
Enough on being punctual and pumping up the inspiration, I think it’s more basic human nature to become lazy and put events off. Procrastination for most is one of the more powerful habits that eventually inhibit success for many. May it be getting started on an essay, an unfun chore around the house, or getting started on a book on a fine Sunny Friday afternoon. At least for myself this is 75% of the struggle, but once started this 75% of the entire task just feels like it has completed itself. Once things get rolling, it’s hard to stop since the initial momentum furthers it right along and until you have marched past the finish line… stopping is quite simply difficult. I hope this is true for another blog streak… Just an attempt nothing major though.
The prime reason for not posting is that I have been spending time elsewhere, like reading, researching and being too involved to care much about this site. With those on the verge of contemplation, I encourage you to START! Start with even taking night school, work & learn, Summer High School, but most of all take a class this Fall when most Universities and Colleges open up for business. THere really is no comparison at all with anything than the classroom, no matter what side of the instructorish fence you are on. Again I urge you to take classes, head back to school; you will not have any regrets at all...
Enough about the why, now about the what: I personally believe in the power of thought, thinking through things throughout the past and why they occurred and what can be done to plan avoiding similar pitfalls in the future.
Riding across the mediascape one clearly knows radio, Television, tabloids, papers and certainly the internet has been full of stories about the doom and gloom the US housing bubble has brought upon us, leading to a near global meltdown and the subsequent aftershocks that have created a wave of horror up to even today; it has even led to some powerful nations to the brink of bankruptcy.
Never mind the media, we all know that we, the consuming public need a fat juicy story to captivate us, but this economic thing, the entire world focus on the economy has been such a ginormous deal that when the Canadian Minority Government fell here above the 49th, the candidate (now Prime Minister Harper; and yes, we have just come out of an election) made it his mission to ensure this butter-bread business became the absolute single election cow. And it was milked like crazy. Obama had change in his sails in 2008; it lead him into the harbour of victory, and Mr Harper arrowed on his action plan shooting him to a first right majority in a long time.
Since a former neighbour asked me how hard Canadian University Education in the Arts is. It really got me thinking, how much people fear the classroom. Well I did too for a long time and would do, and did anything to escape it. But the unknown does tend to frighten. I decided to show and tell ‘em what I went though my education journey with proper original artefacts. I decided to hunt them down and present as accurate a picture I could so that they know what you need to get through this jail of a jungle called higher education. One of the most revered professors told of a very profound reality that we are heading through today. It was that looking through old first had documents was a pain. Since there was very little often, wordy and patchy excerpts on early Canadian history, to our surprise some outright doctoring had been popularized and had even made into textbooks of repute. The professor mentioned that when future historians and ethnographers look to study the genesis of the internet era, they will find it amazingly difficult to put together even a shabby picture of how we lived. For that reason I have attempted to keep records intact. I realized that keeping a few of the course outlines I had from recent years would come in handy, and they have in a big way. So, now a few months ago I asked one of my Professors to e-mail me past essays that I had submitted electronically. I had the hard copies, but they were locked up and put away. I got them promptly even during a sabbatical. As it turned out I have not had an opportunity to share them with the person who had requested to gauge the difficulty/ease of the ‘Average Canadian University.’ Anyway, this was on the backburner for a while now, it had been sitting there in my inbox until this week when a search for something totally unrelated turned it up. I was pleasantly surprised. We all are, after encountering relics from the distant past, stuff that doesn’t surface for a long duration, when it does, we look at it and reflect with bewilderment. How this could be, then it all makes sense once it has been put into context.
While reading the first few paragraphs, it took me back to the most stressful time of the semester when it was submitted, in the wee months of 2008, I came to realize that history is indeed something that you should look back and often. Since most often, in it are hidden huge chunks of wisdom. This is why I have a great deal of respect for historians of all stripes be they genuine or agenda driven. And even more so for the ones that put two and to together and come up with five.
In that essay, I basically argued using all the evidence collected in the course of a semester from lectures and the text on every known civilization that ‘The American Empire Will Not Fall,’ no matter what happens in the future.
Little did we know that a crisis would befall the world and have us all panicking like a bunch of chickens under the shadow of the wolf. Yes, most of us common folk are still scared out of our wits, there is now serious doubts about ‘The American Dream’ and our middle class designations are seemingly escaping our grip.
Let me just copy and paste some sections, since this class is still being taught I will not put up an extensive amount of text.
“Khubilai Khan, the heir and successor to Chianggis Khan, controlled Northern China and sought to unify all of China under his control. He led a successful campaign against the Song dynasty of Southern China; his forces took the capital in 1276 and three years later the last resistors of the Song fell and Khubilai Khan crowned himself the supreme emperor of China thus ushering in the era of the Yuan dynasty.”
In addition to this instance from the East and seemingly long time ago, the fate of another Empire also ended with a sudden and tragic demise:
“Less than a century later, Francisco Pizarro set out to repeat [a similar feat] in South Central America; with about 600 soldiers they had marched into the heartland of the Incas and secured control of their capital in less than three years. Diseases such as smallpox crippled Inca society and infighting between competing factions ensured the swift collapse of their civilization.”
Lest we remain in denial, the resulting global implications if the ‘American Empire’ were to come to a swift demise, are a concern to us all, especially with the looming debt ceiling crisis. This though is not the topic I had in mind for this evening.
The obvious surprise is that even more firmly established empires have been rooted out like a badly cavitied brown tooth in front of a dentist. History again provides us with ample proof that circumstances often tally up quite nicely to lead to a swift demise of even the most powerful of entities.
“Hernán Cortés, seized the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan with only 450 soldiers in 1521. Cortés and his men with the aid of horses and simple firearms laid siege and eventually starved the inhabitants into surrender. The population of the Aztec empire was around 13 million; as the Spanish conquest progressed, epidemic diseases rapidly raced through the empire. Smallpox alone exterminated a vast numbers of population that society soon ceased to function.”
Enough with the past. Let me end tonight with what I in my ‘undergraduate wisdom’ and naivety hypnotised about the ‘Future American Empire’ and its possible lasting ‘Influences.’ Well, Jonathan Swift did say it best: “There are lies, Damn Lies and there are Statics” This may seem to apply to history too to a certain extent, there is always the other story, one that is unkind to you for you hadn’t the opportunity to write it. An infinite number of scholars on an infinite number of workstations for an infinite number of hours may do a subject to death, but there will still come along another genius who will one day shine light on some obscure, previously overlooked evidence and prove others unwise. So today as I see the Great Canadian Loony kick the wind out of the longly powerful green now way backed stuff I today urge myself to not lose faith in studying history or even causally reflecting where it can lead to. Hindsight 20/20 was something I learned in Psychology 1200 and it just hit me earlier this week that the {(Bread and Butter) or (Guns)} choice with respect to the USSR (Russian Folk during the Cold War) and the more contemporized US situation has significant parallels, it may well be way more neatly tidied up, ultimately is starkly similar. Quoting the Father of the Modern Tea Party Movement and the 2008 US Presidential hopeful Ron Paul(R-Texas) from his great book:* "With a presence in some ~118 countries no wonder they hate us" this has finally taken a toll and by factoring this into the equation we cannot discount putting together two and two may infact give us five:
“[Most of] human history has been marked by patterns of growth and decline among civilizations due to unavoidable internal factors and external threats. Virtually all ancient and more recent civilizations have been prone to this systemic feature. However, Western civilization (United States) in its various incarnations with the firm aid of entrenched institutions, contemporary technological advancements and global geo-political dynamics in its favour appears to prove immunity from the aforementioned cycle of rise and fall and the American Empire will endure the currents of history for a long into the future.”
