history is a crazy thing.. as i get further away from my college experience, i am realizing that studying the actions that people took before us is probably pretty worthwhile (which is silly, because when i was in school, i was all about current issues). to use a nautical metaphor, today, right now, is the surfacing edge of history’s iceberg and, as dicaprio and dion emotionally proved, bad things happen when all you see is surface.

did you know that when gorbachev instigated glasnost (which literally means “public voicing”, according to my google search) in the U.S.S.R. in the late 1980’s, all he was looking for was a breath of less stale air within the communist framework? let a few newspapers run opinon pages and that sort of thing. i feel like i was brought up on the idea that he was a revolutionay, when in fact he was a fairly conservative politician who unwittingly started the leak in the dam.. (amazing how dams break so well, how entropy rules atoms and empires and everything in between).. within a few years, the republic he had ruled was gone.. crazy shit.

i’m not sure that you can defy history, individually or collectively, try as you may