Omission of Voices : Week of 9.20
With the topics of the essay’s coming up this week, my brain has been spinning around one word in particular, omission. Before this week I had heard the word, omission, but it had never really meant anything to me, except for in the form of lies. Lies are made from the omission of facts or details about certain things or times. After joining this class I learned how many lies or “tweaked” truths we had been told in our history classes. Yes, you want to create a sense of national pride in your young citizens, but is it ethical to do that through a series of lies over the course of the first 18 years of life?
Back at the beginning of my blogs I had said that my family loved to travel. With my travels I thought that I knew so much more about the culture and history of other places, but in some cases I didn’t. I think back to all of my travels and wonder, at what point were these people's voices silenced or omitted from my high school history books? In order to answer these questions and to fix these lies is to actually open our hearts and minds to listen. We need to listen to their perspective and know that we don’t always need to learn from the “victors”. We need to be curious and want to gain more knowledge than before, and teach that to people of all ages. We need to stop the omission of peoples voices.
Hey Illy! I really enjoyed how you focused on the idea of omission in your post. In the class we are learning about so much more than just Latin America. We're learning about history and how it is sort of "created" by a global culture of different viewpoints. Some viewpoints will omit details that they don't find important to history or even shameful to themselves. As a result, history will never be the full truth of what we are learning. It's human nature to protect one's self-image, and history is no exception to that.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Illy, for the post. I like the discussion of omissions and how history has sometimes been used to create a sense of national identity. You are right about the need to hear voices of the past to understand what and why something happened. I was left wanting to read about an example of this as a way to support your argument.
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