Too bad they don’t post the Sunday Rutland Herald/Times Argus on line, but they don’t. Wally Roberts has a really great piece in the Perspective section titled A long time coming.
In his oped Roberts talks of his first and second hand experience with the not long ago past, civil rights and what he called “state-sanctioned terrorists defending white supremacy.” It’s an excellent read if you get the chance, and what I follow with below is merely an addendum to all the efforts put forth by Wally and his co-horts.
At some point in the future history will view the Obama election more as a transition than an event unto itself. It will be talked and taught about as merely one step in a journey of human rights and recognition that started millenia ago. Future generations will not see this event as the defining moment we do today much like we now view World War II as a fuzzy part of our past despite our grandparents having lived and fought it.
This isn’t because history will be forgetful or leave important details of the human condition out. It is simply because the further in time one is removed from an event the more distant is the view.
In quantum physics there is an ultimate smallest to everything: space and time and matter and energy and everything else can only be taken down to a special size called the Planck unit. The Planck length, for example, is 1.6 x 10 to the minus 34ths inches … that’s a 16 preceeded by a decimal point and 34 zeros. There is no distance that is smaller than that number. Time itself has a Planck length: time can reach a span no shorter than the ever so brief period it takes light to cross the Plank length.
We just can’t feel the passage of these minute time lengths because we’re too big … to far away … to detect them. What we see instead is an apparent smooth flow from second to second; from one minute, hour, day, year and more to the next … from the past to the present into the future in a seamless movement of time.
But today, right now, we can see the line in our political history we’ve just crossed. We have elected the first non-caucasion President in our nation’s history, and that is a cause for celebration. I along with many others believed that entrenched racism was still too strong for this event, but a newer generation proved us baby boomers wrong. We just finished yet one more small step for man and giant step for mankind … and we got to witness it first hand!
Somewhere in the not too distant future, probably about two generations down the road, folks will see the Obama election as something that was obvious and long overdue. The closeness and personal experiences will have faded away to grandparents and the dead. But that’s not because history won’t care, it’ll only be due to the passage of temporal distance.
That doesn’t mean we can’t relish the historical nature of the moment. This is a Planck moment … but it’s our Planck moment.