standing in lines...
I'm sitting here and I'm reading through a stack of books to write a paper on how the fascists used architecture and art to control the countries they inhabited and I'm reading a book, a personal account that just kinda hit me, so although I know I should be continuing on, it seemed relevant enough to post
"As we reached the outskirts of the city, we saw immense lines for milk, bread, and newspapers. People stood in the numbing cold, talking, moving their hands, pounding the ground to keep warm. They were dressed in long gray coats with lambskin hats pulled over their ears. Some wore several sweaters, and the women looked like onions with a half dozsed skirts wrapped around them, as well as elaborate layers of kerchiefs around their heads. I rememvred being a child in those lines, endlessly fascinated by the ceaseless chatter of the adults, gathering news tidbits for my mother, little bits of salcious gossip for my friends, even rare words I didn't understand, which I put in a little notebook I had, called "Strange Words I Heard in Line." These were the working people of Bucharest, of Romania. They had stood in line for forty-five years patiently waiting for the barest necessities. A revolution was going on, but the lines were still long - the same as the week before, the year before, the previous decade....Are there, I wonder, people on this earth, whole countries, whole continents perhaps, doomed forever to the lines of misery, anticipation, and scarcity? As the world I know in America grows more satiated, more colorful, more overstimulated, these lines get longer, more desperate, the people in them more drab... and there is less at the counter when, after aeons of standing, they arrive, hands outstretched, the sweaty money they hold worthless after all that time.... Still, there is a difference between these lines and those of my childhood. No one is listening, waiting to report people's discontents.... At least I hope so. Every word people speak now would have been consisdered treason only moments ago. And what of those people whose jobs had been to listen and to report? Do they feel shame, or embarrassment, or fear? They certainly haven't disappeared; they are doubtlessly still in line, listening. (After all, they, too, have families they have the feed.) Full of unusable infromation, would they eventually disintegrate? Publicly confess? Get religion? I had the fleeting vision of a revolution that works on the honor system: Bad peopls arrest themselves."
- A Hole in the Flag
"As we reached the outskirts of the city, we saw immense lines for milk, bread, and newspapers. People stood in the numbing cold, talking, moving their hands, pounding the ground to keep warm. They were dressed in long gray coats with lambskin hats pulled over their ears. Some wore several sweaters, and the women looked like onions with a half dozsed skirts wrapped around them, as well as elaborate layers of kerchiefs around their heads. I rememvred being a child in those lines, endlessly fascinated by the ceaseless chatter of the adults, gathering news tidbits for my mother, little bits of salcious gossip for my friends, even rare words I didn't understand, which I put in a little notebook I had, called "Strange Words I Heard in Line." These were the working people of Bucharest, of Romania. They had stood in line for forty-five years patiently waiting for the barest necessities. A revolution was going on, but the lines were still long - the same as the week before, the year before, the previous decade....Are there, I wonder, people on this earth, whole countries, whole continents perhaps, doomed forever to the lines of misery, anticipation, and scarcity? As the world I know in America grows more satiated, more colorful, more overstimulated, these lines get longer, more desperate, the people in them more drab... and there is less at the counter when, after aeons of standing, they arrive, hands outstretched, the sweaty money they hold worthless after all that time.... Still, there is a difference between these lines and those of my childhood. No one is listening, waiting to report people's discontents.... At least I hope so. Every word people speak now would have been consisdered treason only moments ago. And what of those people whose jobs had been to listen and to report? Do they feel shame, or embarrassment, or fear? They certainly haven't disappeared; they are doubtlessly still in line, listening. (After all, they, too, have families they have the feed.) Full of unusable infromation, would they eventually disintegrate? Publicly confess? Get religion? I had the fleeting vision of a revolution that works on the honor system: Bad peopls arrest themselves."
- A Hole in the Flag