In 1967 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation commissioned singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot to write a song in commemoration of Canada’s Centennial. Gordon weaved his well-chosen words and music into a remarkably crafted tapestry telling the story of Canada and the building of the Canadian Pacific Railroad; a song many a Canadian suggests should be Canada’s second national anthem.
As I was listening to the song, titled “Canadian Railroad Trilogy”–meandering up and down Highway 61 this past week–I was struck by the closing phrase: “And many are the dead men too silent to be real.”
When Gordon sings this he pauses before delivering the words, “too silent to be real.”
There are many who have gone before us whose voice we no longer hear, whose writings have been archived to the point of out-of-the-way.
While the written word is instructive– American poet Maya Angelou suggests, “Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.”
Gordon Lightfoot, inducted into the Songwriters Hall Of Fame in 2012, excels at this with his distinctive vocal resonance.
There is nuance in the human voice and expression that conveys understanding beyond that which is deciphered from the written word.
It was the 18th century Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke who counseled, “In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.”
Seventeen centuries earlier the Apostle Paul taught, “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us.”
Unfortunately, and increasingly, there are deliberate attempts to silence the voice of those who do not agree with a specific way of thinking. It has become the preferred tool for use in education and public opinion management in support of a particular ideology.
Canadian historian and professor at the University of Oxford, Margaret MacMillan, asserts, “We can learn from history, but we can also deceive ourselves when we selectively take evidence from the past to justify what we have already made up our minds to do.”
French philosopher (1912-1994) Jacques Ellul states, “The orchestration of press, radio and television [and I would add Google, Facebook and Twitter to the list] to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda visually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment.”
As I suggested in 2013,
“In our arrogance we deny all we know to be true
In our pride we change the words on the pages
We rewrite history and the stories of our lives as we need them to be.”
R. G. Collingwood, English philosopher, historian and archaeologist, best know for his posthumously published The Idea of History (1946), writes: ”History is for human self-knowledge … the only clue to what man can do is what man has done …
The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.”
Tough to do when we selectively censor the voices from our past to the point that these great men and women from history have become “too silent to be real.”
Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works, as well as other topics. At times the column is editorial in nature.
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