Mark Twain is reputed to have observed that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Listen carefully, and you’ll hear the rhyming. As the US National Anthem was being played, October 16, 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists giving the black power salute. It was the Mexico City Summer Olympics where they had just won the gold and bronze medals in the 200-meter dash. Barely 6 months earlier, Martin Luther King, Jr. had died of an assassin’s bullet in Memphis.
Nearly fifty years later, September 1, 2016, San Francisco Forty-niners quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, took a knee instead of standing during the National Anthem before their game with the San Diego Chargers. Barely two months earlier, Philando Castile had been killed in Minneapolis by a police bullet, and Altor Sterling had similarly died in Baton Rouge. Rhyming history: 1968 and 2016.
I had my own rhyming experience on December third. My wife and I were invited to a screening of Devotion at the Saenger Theater in downtown Hattiesburg. The director and principal actors were there. The film recounts the story of Hattiesburg native, Jesse Brown, the Navy’s first black fighter pilot and his friendship with his white wingman, Thomas Hudner. Brown’s plane was shot down on a remote mountain top during the Korean War, seventy-two years before, on December 4, 1950. Hudner crash landed his plane beside Brown’s where he tried to free him from the plane’s tangled wreckage. He failed, and there Brown died a hero’s death. He was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his bravery under fire in the Chosin Reservoir Campaign.
I remember the grainy black and white newsreels from the Korean War on my parents’ Westinghouse TV. I overheard them worrying whether my dad would be called up. He was still in the reserves, only six years past discharge from the Navy in 1945.
Suddenly, I had a new connection with that seven-year-old youngster and the war he observed through his child’s eyes. History was given a face, that of Ensign Jesse Brown, and I was reminded of the complex and dangerous events whirling around my then- innocent world. Rhyming: 1950 and 2022.
Then there was the December 21, 2022 speech before the combined Houses of Congress by Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Nearly eighty years earlier, Prime Minister Winston Churchill stood in the same spot and for the same urgent purpose. It was barely three weeks after Japan’s December 7th attack on Pearl Harbor. On December 26, 1941, Churchill reminded the US that we, along with the British Empire, were the essential custodians of democracy’s flame, and that we must stand together to defeat the authoritarian brutality of Italy, Japan and Germany.
Zelenskyy asked for more and stronger military hardware, and, like Churchill, sought to solidify his alliance with the United States to stand against and turn back Russia’s brutal aggression. Rhyming: 1941 and 2022.
Zelenskyy’s speech also echoed the Munich Agreement of 1938, in which England and France advised the Czech government to cede a large portion of its country to Germany. Failing to stand up to Hitler’s threats to invade, were he not “given” this territory (known as Sudetenland) only emboldened Hitler, and he invaded Czechoslovakia the following March. Rhyming: 1938 and 2022.
We seem to engineer this kind of historical rhyming with annual remembrances. Whether it’s the Fourth of July or Juneteenth; Christmas or Hanukkah; or one’s birthday or wedding anniversary--when it comes around the next year, it’s similar to, but not identical with, last year. The two rhyme.
This New Year’s Eve, the same words will be spoken and sung as last year, and the same symbols will be displayed. But this New Year’s Eve will also be different: some will be absent; some will be newcomers; and important events—social, political, religious, personal-- will have taken place, and you and I will not be the same persons we were last New Year’s Eve.
Life thus moves in a Great Helix. The span of time to go around that spiral could take a day, a year, a decade, no matter. The questions are, How does a particular Remembrance differ from the last time it came around? What am I to make of it?
My New Year’s wish is that we, all of us, will work, even struggle, successfully, despite the many counter forces out there--for more wisdom, not less, more courage, not less and more love, not less--all directed toward creating a world of Peace and Justice.
Dr. Conville is a professor of communication studies (ret.) and a long-time resident of Hattiesburg. He can be reached at rlconville@yahoo.com.
