History is Complicated

("Marina Ginesta" by Source (WP:NFCC#4). Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marina_Ginesta.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Marina_Ginesta.jpg)

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Look.

This is Marina Ginestà in 1936, a seventeen-year-old French expat in Barcelona, where she is a reporter for the Soviet Pravda.

Had I learned about her in high school, I would have been told that she was an example of how civilians and youths were pulled into the war in a variety of ways. I would have learned that everyday people were forced to choose sides, or had atrocities visited on them. The history of plain folk.

Had I learned about her in the past few years, I would have thought of her as a member of the International Brigade, part of a movement that was ill-prepared and ill-treated by the Soviet Union, a movement of romantics that believed in a cause so much that they were blinded to its crimes. A monolithic entity.

I think that I am growing wiser. Having seen this photograph this morning, I see a child half-grown and fighting with a pen; someone who must have dealt with the betrayal of the Soviet Union’s treaty with Nazi Germany, and the later betrayal of its totalitarian regime; who had seventy-eight years of life after the photo that defined her life for most who know of her. I see someone who fought with fear, and doubt, and pain, and courage, and hope, and pulled decisions from this cocktail that rebounded off other people’s decisions to gain speed and more speed until they smash into other decisions and the result is history.

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Look.

This is what history is made of.

“History is the diary of a madman” only if you assume that just one person is writing it, with mood swings wrenching the world he writes between communism, fascism and social democracy.

History is not the diary of a madman, history is a piece of binder paper getting passed around in a class. History is written by billions of humans writing over each other, scratching out what the last person said, scribbling questions before passing it on, and grabbing it back to change their mind. History is Franz Ferdinand passing Sarajevo a note saying “Do you like me?” and a classroom of 1.8 billion deciding how to react to the checked box.

History is a speech tournament with a nation’s worth of speakers debating, arguing, yelling over each other, bargaining, compromising, and throwing up their hands until the 19th Amendment passes – then it’s those same speakers going to the nearest Denny’s, and asking each other “What’s next? Was that enough? Did we fix the problem? Are we healed?”

History is complicated, and constant, and never quite finished.


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Coda:

Y'know, I think I have a problem with being verbose... well, I already knew I had one, but today I ended up writing several hours to get most of a page in order to say "history is complicated, yo."