I am Responsible

...for?

Everything. All the time. So are we all. We have gotten to this point in history through our choices and the choices of those who have gone before us. It’s all part of Time Binding - something that sets our species apart from the others. We are coming up fast on the Fourth of July anniversary of the Declaration of Indepence by our nation.

For this event, I recommend that everyone dust off the 1972 musical, 1776.

It is free here on YouTube. I’ve queued it up to the point where Richard Henry Lee commits to delivering Virginia’s Resolution on Independence. Personally, it hits close to home as my late father was producing important works 50 years ago for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation which help to “put flesh on the bones” of the people of two centuries earlier.

Having been born sixty-three years ago in Williamsburg, Virginia and having worked there in various capacities for twenty years between 1974 and 1994, I have a sense of the shades that haunt the corners of that institution. It is a continuing experiment in memorializing our origins and is marking its 100th year of existence this year.

For myself, I sit in Washington, DC surrounded in “the bunker” by the archives of my late father and my own collections. I could use the services of a registrar such as my mother. She was the Registrar of the Department of Collections at Colonial Williamsburg between 1972 and 2004 and their current collections management system still runs on the software that she selected after moving it from a card-catalog system through different IT applications to this online catalog.¹

From here, I am doing what I can to preserve something of our family’s history in honor of all the generations that have gone before. Due to pedigree collapse and the facts of life, we share ancestors within a very few generations. We are all closely related in our species. We have very little genetic diversity. We obviously forget this. We divide into tribes and contend against each other. We forget the enormous power that rests with us to create a far better world for those who come after. It is time we all recognized that we are responsible. That’s why I am doing the work about which I wrote a few days ago.

As noted, I do not edit myself. I simply state the way I see things and hope that someone who might read it may pick up what I’m laying down here. We need to be good ancestors, I believe. We are in increasingly great danger of creating a tangle that our progeny will be hard pressed to unravel. We are creating conditions which could easily lead to our extinction as a species after all we have accomplished over the course of the past ten thousand years. Since 18 years before my birth, we’ve had that capability and been living under its many shadows.

I could go on. I don’t know, but I would very much like to have your perspectives. Therefore, please consider leaving a comment or sending a message. Amplify my signal through cyberspace with a restack. Liking isn’t necessary and, in fact, is generally not welcome if it’s not accompanied by an action that is more meaningful like restacking at minimum.

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1. https://emuseum.colonialwilliamsburg.org/objects/89015/dressing-table?ctx=ff096b806867485aaca75e214b0577fbfa1d669d&idx=1000 shows a table that was in our family for 30 years after being in the Galt-Nicholson House from the time of its manufacture. My parents returned it into the Colonial Williamsburg collection in 2008