It's Spring Break and campus is pretty empty for the most part. The lack of student hustle and bustle plus the mostly beautiful weather today is making work tough. It's like working on a Saturday. Not helping the productivity 'round here.
I'm finishing metadata on one of the field collections that we scanned in Fayette. The whole project is winding down. Our website for all of our Civil War materials should be going live this week, hopefully. It's pretty cool, I think. It includes images, manuscript collections, newspapers, and a very cool timeline all related to the Civil War. I know a lot of people are tired of hearing about the Civil War, many of my co-workers are included in that group. The Civil War gets a lot of attention in school classrooms and on tv and in history books, etc. I do think it would be good to move past the constant rehashing of some parts of the Civil War, but I don't think you have to shun everything. I know I'm biased, but it's kind of important to look at how people survived during that time. Not study only the soldiers and the battles and the politics and the military strategies, but the actual day-to-day lives of the people who were kind of stuck in the middle of it all. People liked the movie "Cold Mountain" because it showed the social history of the era, not the battles or the political pushing and pulling and scheming. It's just people trying to survive and I think that's the bigger and better lesson to teach kids and adults alike. To me, the social history aspect is more interesting than who won which battle, which General did what, etc. How people pulled together and survived when things were literally falling down around them. It's not a North vs. South thing; it's just a people-thing. Yay for people.
To expand on the celebration of people theme: the generation that lived through the Civil War was a generation who were able to handle a crisis moderately well. Otherwise, they wouldn't have lived through it. On an individual level, I like to think that most Civil War-era people came out the other side of the war a much stronger and optimistic bunch than when they entered the war. It's been my personal experience that when you go through something really really awful, you tend to get stronger and, in that strength, you can become more optimistic about life in general. I suppose some people might go the other direction and it might take people longer to get to the optimistic conga line than others, but the happiest people that I know are people who have been through some really terrible things. Some of the most depressed people I know are actually people who haven't had anything go all that wrong for them yet, but they just aren't happy for whatever reason. I know everyone has problems and I don't think you should judge anybody based on what they have and haven't been through, but tough experiences can teach you how good you have it most days. I think survivors of awful circumstances and situations learn to take fewer things for granted. It starts to take a lot more to bring you down from being an overall happy person...more than just a speeding ticket or a fender-bender or the fact that somebody charged you twice for an item at the grocery store. You know that these things aren't that bad because your overall comprehension as to what constitutes bad things has expanded. That's why I figure that those who survived the Civil War must have been pretty strong and possibly pretty optimistic... When you've been in a really dark place, I think you can generally find light in almost anything.
Now I'm on a roll.
Can you take more?
At lunch a couple of weeks ago a friend of mine was telling me about how worried she is about the way the country is heading. She's not alone. A lot of people are worried about the future of the United States and feel like, as a nation, we're falling apart. I don't share these worries or fears. People are incredibly resilient. I'm not worried about what will happen or what won't happen. For one thing, worrying is the most fruitless activity. All it does it stress you out and make you sick. Cut it out. Secondly, history is pretty fantastic at moving in cycles. When the United States is no longer top of the heap in global power, it's not a new thing. Power is a cycle. People talk like the US has always been a powerhouse country and that by losing our leadership footing at the top, or even having to share power, we're somehow going to be destroyed. I don't think so. Not even close. We've been a true global power for less than a century. Out of a total country history of over 230 years. We have more experience at being a middle-of-the-pack-country than we have at being a leader. Middle-of-the-pack is not failure. We're not ashamed of where we come from or who our ancestors were. They lived when the country was 'middle-of-the-pack' and they were explorers, pioneers, inventors, entertainers, and all-around courageous and adventurous people. We come from that and should remember that. Say our government fails completely? Our government has failed before (please turn to the chapter on Articles of Confederation in your history text). Say we lose global influence? In the scope of history, that is a relatively new thing to us anyway. Change won't be comfortable, but it's nothing to freak out about. No matter what happens, I don't think we need to worry. Vote for what you want, deal with what happens and realize that those generations that came before us survived as much or more than what we're going through and so can we. Just rise to the challenge. I would rather be a part of a generation that was tested and became a wiser and more optimistic group than one that was never tested and instead wasted away on worry over the price of gas, who was going to win a reality show, or what somebody really meant by their Facebook status.
To completely switch topics here at the end, have you heard the song "Somebody That I Used to Know" by Goyte? Is it just me or does his voice during the chorus sound a lot like Phil Collins? It reminds me of Phil Collins every time I hear it. Good song, though I don't know why he's standing there "in his altogethers" in the video and he certainly doesn't look like Phil Collins.... Still, click below to get the song stuck in your head, yes?
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