Time and Distance Overcome Review
#Response
So I thought, going into this reading, that this was gonna be about the invention of the telephone. Seemed a little nonfiction for my impression of the class, but I was actually looking forward to reading it. Then the article started talking about the telephone poles instead of the science behind what makes a telephone call possible, so I thought it was shining light on an underappreciated part of the miracle of telecommunications (I watched a video about he transatlantic cable a few weeks back, absolutely crazy how many times that wire fell over the ship and they has to start all over again). It mentioned lynching, which I thought was just more ”hey check out this little known fact about commonplace objects and their history” but then it kept going on and on. I thought it was going on a tangent and kept waiting for the author to circle back around to the telephone poles themselves. After a page or two it became more obvious that this wasn’t a tangent, it was intentional.
And then it was over.
And I was in a bad mood.
Because reality and man’s evil had to get in the way of a nice story about telephone poles. People have to ruin everything. Everything. It wasn’t a funny anecdote about how anti-government Americans cut down telephone poles because of property rights, it was a somber story about the worst part of our country’s history. And I get learning history so we don’t repeat it, I love history. It just was not the story I expected and wasn’t the story I had built up in my mind. I am glad I read it, I had no idea that psychopaths did all those terrible things to others (at least, I didn’t now they used telephone poles), and I am now enlightened.
But now I can’t un-enlighten myself.
I have a video in my watch later on Youtube, by the same channel who made the Trans-Atlantic cable video. It’s about the Union Pacific Big Boy locamotive. I can’t look at it the same way anymore.
”Aw cool it’s a huge train!”
The track was laid by Irish and Chinese immigrants in terrible working conditions as they faced rampant racism by the very country they traveled halfway around the world, also in terrible conditions, to get to.
”It could travel across the entire continent in three and a half days!”
By encroaching on land previously belonging to the indigenous people of the Americas and essentially ruining their nomad way of life.
”That thing was so powerful!”
Ya by burning a bunch of coal and spewing tons of carbon into the atmosphere, and I bet it smelled bad too.
Pretty depressing right?
I’m a positive person. Some might say naive. So I suppose that’s why this hits me so hard.
But it is good to get a healthy dose of reality every so often. Not overtly pessimistic, not overly optimistic. Just what happened. And even though this story is non-fiction, each writer brings their own perspective of reality to a work (ohhhh now I see the connection. Well played). So each writer will tend to emphasize the worst or the best parts of reality. To get a picture of the truth, we must examine each perspective, and combine them all to get the truth. And after reading the worse side of the telephone pole, we can combine that with what we have been taught about the telephone since kindergarten, and get a more truthful (and nuanced, because the world does not exist in black and white) picture.
