An Anacronism

While visiting Stockholm, I had an opportunity to visit the Vassa Museum. The museum is built around a ship that foundered in the port in 1628 and was raised in 1961. The ship itself is an anachronism; it is like the iceman that they found in the Alps several years ago. These items have fallen into our world from a distant past and they provide us a window to consider these times, if not to experience them.

Many of the sailors on the Vassa drowned when the ship went down and I spent a lot of time thinking about them. What were their dreams? Did they find happiness in their lives? What were their lives like? We hear very much about the suffering and squalor that were a central part of those times for most people in Europe. I don’t doubt that there’s some truth in this, but I’ve come to question much of what we are taught to take for granted. We are constantly told that we live in the best of all possible countries in the best of all possible worlds. I’ve seen first hand that in many ways the first part of this mantra is false…I have no more doubt that the second is equally untrue. Looking at it all from this perspective, the people who feed us this “Mom and Apple Pie” stuff are just as ridiculous as Voltaire made them out to be.

What I have found in my travels is that we are much more alike than we are different. The Chinese, the French, the Maltese, and the Greeks. People everywhere are not so very different from each other. They all share the same hopes and dreams. The same things are important to most of us, and they are not the things that we hear on the news or are told about ourselves. It’s the people in our lives, our lovers and our friends. I have seen as much happiness in the eyes of the poor farmer in Hainan as I have seen in the eyes of the rich stock broker in Manhattan. It is not comfort or things that make us happy and a hard life does not mean a life of despair.

If the people that I have met around the world are so similar, then why should the people who are separated from us by the gulf of time be any different? It seems that those in power need to make us feel that we are unique and that every one else thinks and feels differently than we do. I think they do this to maintain their own power, but it also keeps us separated…keeps us apart from one another. This is the great tragedy of our world; that our leaders would separate us for their own good and to our own great loss. I don’t think it was any different for those who died on the Vassa. They were told that they, the Swedes, were the good guys and that the Poles were the bad guys. They were proud of who they were and of what they were doing. They were proud of all the wrong things, just like we are today.

I have always been very proud of being an American, but I think I’m over that delusion now. I find much of John Lennon wrote to be naïve, but I can’t get over the idea of, “Imagine there’s no country…” That thought sounds pretty good to me!

Best! Norm.