![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edwardsFunny how perspective shifts. Each layer, each generation, seems bigger and closer than that which came before. The here and now, the youth and the established, that is all there is. Yet in the vanishing point there we see where we come from, the acorn at the start of the family tree. In Syria, Israel, America, Africa, Britain, Germany, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Iraq... everywhere... we glance back at the tiniest one of all with decreasing frequency and scrutiny, fascinated by the detail on the largest, the first to be found, the easiest to dismantle and study.
Yet the littlest one is the one that defines the shape of all the layers above it. It is the one that takes the most effort to reach, and the most skill to retain all the clarity within the stories and the paths painted on that solid core, so small it can be clasped in a fist without changing the shape of the hand at all.
If you take the doll apart, layer by layer, when you see it again you don't just see the colourful surface. When you see it, you see all the faces at come before. Even at the vanishing point, that last little seed is as clear as day.
Maybe we don't want to. Maybe we're happy with the multicultural matriarch we find at the start, the illusion of home comforts and happiness, without going back to find the slave traders, racists and warmongers that came before. But without seeing them, we're too easily led into believing that our hate and fears are justified. And when we shift into the next layer, when that wooden shell clicks around us, hiding us from immediate scrutiny, who will be looking then?
It is, of course, all about the smallest one in the end. What impression are we letting the media and leaders of today place on future generations, as we hide from refugees, lash out and bite at shadows and lies, take comfort in the very things that have poisoned humanity for generations?
Yet the littlest one is the one that defines the shape of all the layers above it. It is the one that takes the most effort to reach, and the most skill to retain all the clarity within the stories and the paths painted on that solid core, so small it can be clasped in a fist without changing the shape of the hand at all.
If you take the doll apart, layer by layer, when you see it again you don't just see the colourful surface. When you see it, you see all the faces at come before. Even at the vanishing point, that last little seed is as clear as day.
Maybe we don't want to. Maybe we're happy with the multicultural matriarch we find at the start, the illusion of home comforts and happiness, without going back to find the slave traders, racists and warmongers that came before. But without seeing them, we're too easily led into believing that our hate and fears are justified. And when we shift into the next layer, when that wooden shell clicks around us, hiding us from immediate scrutiny, who will be looking then?
It is, of course, all about the smallest one in the end. What impression are we letting the media and leaders of today place on future generations, as we hide from refugees, lash out and bite at shadows and lies, take comfort in the very things that have poisoned humanity for generations?
