Perspective

One thing that is always on my mind is perspective. Not as in art and vanishing angles, which I leave to artists, but rather how we look at things. Politics tends to be full of people looking at things from a narrow perspective. I prefer to look at things from many views and as wide a perspective as possible. In the past I tried to put some of this into words, but feel I failed. So here goes again.

History is full of events. Each event can be looked at in isolation. I just watched a program about Nagasaki in the months after the atomic bomb. Many interviews of with the people who lived through it. Everything they said was valid, but I began to see that it was not the only view to take of those events. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki left horrible devastation. The force of the explosions leveled a large area and the heat vaporized everything within a certain radius. It left people injured and dying and as the immediate effects finished, the longer term effects began to take hold even as the cities began to recover. These two cities had an extra legacy to deal with, radiation sickness, that no other bombing sites in the world had seen before. It was horrible. It tugs at the heart and brings tears to the eyes. Yet save for the radiation and the number of bombs, this was a scene that played out all over the world. It had played out during the fire bombing of Tokyo. It was played out in Europe in city after city. Why? When a country goes to war, the civilian population is put to work making the weapons of war. In order to bring a quicker end to the war, factories and other facilities were targeted. WWII bombs were not terribly exact so to ensure a target was hit, they had to bomb a large area. The first atomic bombs were to accomplish this with one bomb. It worked and the devastation they caused is remembered to this day and is barely a taste of where such weapons were developed to.

But bombing isn't the only horror in war. What conquering armies can do can be even worse. There are worse things than death. Case in point are all the camps established for WWII. We all know about the concentration campus where millions died in Europe at the hands of the Nazis, but the US internment campus and the Japanese POW camps. Starvation existed in many of those camps and starvation followed in the wake of the armies. The US took the unprecedented step of feeding the refugees after the war, but most of the horror of that occurred during the war. With their systematic killing, the Germans silenced many of the stories, but the Japanese did not often outright kill their prisoner and the raping and torture is fairly well documented by survivors. And when you travel back into history things get even worse. How many know that Hitler was only the third most deadly leader of that era. Hitler and the Nazis killed more than 10 million people. Joseph Stalin is estimated to have had around 20 million killed. And before either of them, King Leopold II of Belgium killed upwards of 15 million. And going back much further, an estimated 40 million died during the Mongol conquest.

So, perspective. Whose view do you focus on? Let's narrow in on Japan in WWII. What view do you take? Do we feel for the civilians bombed by the US? Of course. Do we feel for the Koreans, Chinese, and many others that the Japanese conquered and subjugated? Of course. Ultimately the fault lies with those who started the war. War is hell. In some wars it seems that hell actually comes to earth for people to try and survive. WWII was such a war. Hell came to Europe and the Pacific rim at the hands of the Axis powers and the Allied powers only added to that to prevent the horrors from spreading any further. Horrors upon horrors. That is the perspective of war. We feel for the victims no matter the cause because so many of them were innocent of causing the horrors but were the ones who had to live through it.

In other areas we need perspective in looking at day to day events. So many times people insist that you look at things from just one perspective. Sometimes that is not the only valid perspective. Sometimes it is. Frankly when the second perspective is from a racist or murderer, that is not a valid perspective. Not when their hate led to someone else’s suffering. People can become mentally ill. Injury, sickness, dementia, and many other causes, and none of those are an excuse for their behavior. It is the reason and we can come to understand why their minds led them in that direction, but we don't have to tolerate it or accept the actions. The one single incident that I think best describes what I am talking about is the story of Patrick Stewart's parents. Stewart grew up in an abusive home. His father would go off on his mother and beat her terribly. She took the brunt of it. for most of his life he held great hatred for his father, but something made him question it. Perhaps the glimmers of his better side. So he investigated (with the help of the TV show Who Do You Think You Are?) and what he uncovered opened his eyes. His father had been with the British troops in France. Part of the troops pulled out at Dunkirk. They were able to trace his duty through that period and found he had been exposed to some of the horrors of what the German troops were doing to civilians. It has scarred him. Scarred him horribly. He was never the same. He finally had the answer to why his mother had always stayed by her husband's side. She saw it as a war wound. Many came back with physical scars, or missing parts. The elder Stewart had come back with scars of the mind. Today we have treatments and therapies, but in those days there was nothing to do but endure. So Mrs. Stewart endured and loved her damaged husband. So now Patrick Stewart is not only a tireless fighter for domestic abuse, but also for mental health treatment for soldiers. He gained perspective.

With perspective we can judge whether someone acted in response to something or if they acted and caused something. In the grander scheme of WWII, the question on American minds was what it would take for the Japanese to surrender. It couldn't be left up to a guess. We needed it to happen at the earliest possible moment. We can debate whether the Japanese leaders were reading to surrender before the first or after the first bomb, but in reality the world was done with war and every moment it dragged on more people died on both sides. The need for it to end overrode waiting and seeing if one or both bombs was needed. The war ended and the healing began. That was what was needed.

Examining all sides and every perspective allows us to judge events objectively. But as I said, while it is fine to understand a monster's motivations, that is not a side to take. But for us writers, we must learn to write from that monster's perspective. The monster must thing they are doing the right thing. They may be crazy or just plain evil, but from their perspective they are in the right. From any truly objective angle their evil is on display and taking their side makes most people feel sick. Perspective gives us understanding not agreement. Agreeing with a monster make you a monster. There is no getting around that. Agree with Hitler, Stalin, or Charles Manson and you are as much a monster as they are. We all should know right from wrong. But modern events have shown how easy it is to be swayed by monsters. That is when perspective becomes warped.

The Thrill of the Hunt

I don't feel like getting into politics, but I think some of my feelings might be clear from what I am about to cover. I find myself in an odd place these days, but I used to feel I knew where I fit. I still do with writing.

I am a firm believer in science. Some people don't understand a few things about it. Some see science as a monolithic stone structure - unchanging and unmoving. That couldn't be further from the truth. Sure, there are aspects of science that have a long history and have been tested and proven over and over again. But there is another area of science. This is cutting edge and theoretical science. This is an ever changing battle ground of ideas, tests, and results. I've heard some people say that if someone changes their mind or says something different that they can't be trusted. And I'm like.... that is what science does. You form a theory and test it. And the initial results may tell you one thing, but further examination or further testing reveals that the first results should be interpreted in a different way. So it is a constantly changing landscape. In some areas they have competing theories that battle back and forth for years. Sometimes with neither one ever being proven right. Take our current virus. It broke onto the scene as new and different. A mutation from what had come before. So what we knew before didn't really apply, but that was what we had to start with. There were many questions and many theories. So as the questions came up, test were run and our knowledge grew and some things change greatly and some have bounced back and forth as we narrow in on the real facts. It isn't that anyone is lying, it is that they are learning and growing the body of knowledge in real time. It seems to confuse quite a few people. No need. Just go with the latest and don't sweat it. You are watching science at work.

History is a different thing all together. History is the gathering of knowledge of the past. Facts, observations, stories, etc. You have to put everything together to get the full picture. There is what those who lived through that time have to say. Often this is a mix of in the moment writing and looking back writing. Then you have hard facts. Photos, artifacts, less opinion based reporting. Archeology plays a part. It can uncover missing or incorrect elements. In the end, you have to put it all together and some things don't look the same when the full picture comes into focus. In 1912 a great ship sank in the North Atlantic. Only a third of the people on board survived. Man eye witness reports said the ship broke in two, but during the official investigation, no one brought in those witnesses and the official report was that the ship sank intact. Fast forward to 73 years later and the ship was found on the bottom in 2 large pieces and many smaller pieces. It broke in two. But it wasn't until the sea bed was fully surveyed in 2011 that all the pieces were found and the full story of that night could be finally put together. So many movies were made based on what was believed true at the time and at this point, they are all incorrect due to the incomplete information available at the time.

Genealogy is a guessing game. First off, we like to believe that our ancestors were faithful to their marriages and in the age of photographs and now of DNA we can know for sure. But as you delve into the mists of time, that becomes less certain. The realities of family relationships are hidden. Are those really the correct parents. Was the child adopted, were they legitimate, was it some other blood relation or were they strangers. We can't say. Genealogy is partly a research into your DNA and partly a research of family relationships. And it can be fun when you find a mistake. I found I'm related to Benedict Arnold because one family was disconnected from the mother (probably due to her relation to him) even thought he mother was alive when the youngest was born. Setting right such an old error is rewarding. But you still never know what the truth was. One of my grandmother's cousins was really her cousin by blood, but his mother died shortly after he was born and he was given to his childless aunt to raise. Fast forward to when he was in his eighties and he finally found out. Some of those secrets can never be uncovered because the people who knew took them to their grave.

What is true for me in each of these is that it is the hunt for information that draws me. The mystery of what can be found. I follow science more than research it personally, but I have conducted historical and genealogical research. It is truly rewarding. Almost as much as writing. If I wrote in a different genre, like some writer friends of mine, those discoveries could be fodder for stories. Instead I prefer to dream up my own worlds and explore them. Still, those discoveries often creep in anyway.