Some people love tea, some love wine and some love coffee. I love all three and there is an appropriate time of day that we all can agree that is acceptable to drink each beverage. Coffee is the morning beverage, it starts the day and invigorates us for the challenges that we most likely will encounter throughout the day. Tea, is a good beverage throughout that challenging day and is most appropriate for the English to consume around 4:00 in the afternoon. Wine winds us down and steadies us as we prepare for bed and rest. All are healthy beverages when consumed in the proper moderation.
For me, coffee is the most important beverage,. I usually start my day by repeatedly snoozing my alarm until my preset, self-grinding Cuisinart starts up. The sound of the organic Arabica beans being ground and guided into the brew basket is the one thing that motivates my arms to throw the blankets off of me and to wake out of bed. Most mornings I think of my 72 year old cousin who gave me this wonder of technology that brews a perfect carafe of fresh-ground coffee. She, like me, has a long ancestry on this continent that goes further back than the conquest by the Europeans. Our perspective is not unique, but is different from most.
Living in Montana, we are not far from the history that saw cowboys huddled around a campfire watching a percolator bubble with the grounds of cheap coffee as they got their day started. I often keep those images in mind when pouring coffee for my wife and myself, with the rising sun coming in and the sound of life stirring outside the home. Coffee has been a part of my mornings for much of my life and when I set down to enjoy my first cup, I tend to think of my history as well as the history of coffee and the ritual of drinking coffee. It opens my mind to all of the perspectives of that simple morning ritual and how it can bind a large portion of humanity together.
Platitudes can simplify a thought and opens the philosophical thinking of the mind. The thought of how perspectives can be enhanced by how coffee binds us , I felt compelled to pen a new blog and with that thought I wanted a new blog site.
Like the ritual of starting the day with coffee, the start of a new blogging adventure begins with history and keeping that history in mind when looking at our world in the present.
My coffee maker has many moving parts that must be kept in good working order to ensure great coffee. The maintenance and cleanliness of this machine, as tedious as it may seem to be, is a great way to see how history guides us as well. This coffee maker was designed to simplify the act of separately grinding coffee beans. The only processes that it cannot accomplish are the growing and roasting of the beans. That is the point of history; the process of where we are today. The things that we don't see with our own eyes are the growing of the beans and the harvest and the roasting. We see the bag of beans and we see the water and we are responsible for bring this two items together in a machine that further brings them together in a way that makes us happy. History, experienced and learned, comes together in much the same way. There is a level of trust to be put in the hands of the growers as well as historians. We trust that we will buy a good product or be properly informed.
We have to ask ourselves how can we so easily trust the coffee that we don't grow ourselves. In that same idiom; how can we trust the history of the world that we didn't experience ourselves? A simple answer, or platitude, is that we owe our trust to Greek Philosophy. The idea of supply and demand within a system dictates that the system will provide a superior product. The demand for horrible coffee naturally dwindles in the system and eventually is removed from the system leaving only the demand for high-quality coffee. There is a demand for quality informative history as well. Rather than applying capital ideology to history, in the respect that there is a demand for history that satisfies us, there needs to be a demand for the objective quality of history; the accuracy of history as a reality.
Think of the present time with everything that is shaping our societies and lives. The coffee I made this morning will be the history of this blog, but this morning it was simply a great beverage. I don't know where this blog will take me, but it all started with a cup of coffee. That is the objective reality of the history of this blog. This is why I don't intend to be an apologist or revisionist of history. These acts will corrupt the history in attempts to guide the history to fit an agenda.
As I mentioned before, I am a descendant of the indigenous peoples of North America. I am also a descendant of Europeans; a wider base of anthropological history, not a mixing of histories. I do not subscribe to apologist history, nor the idea of revisionist history. History the way we view it starts with the perspective in which we view it, as we trust our own experiences. That is anthropology and ancestry, much like the coffee we progress from the quality bean, to brewing it in a quality machine. Striving for perfection with objective knowledge.
That is what I'll put into this blog. I will research the zeitgeist, the spirit of the history being created in the present, and I will apply it to what is already known in history from an anthropological view and from an experienced view. If it fascinates me, I hope it will fascinate you as well.
I must get back to my cup of coffee and think about the next blog post that will touch on the aspect of breaking down barriers of "us and them". It should be fascinating.
No comments:
Post a Comment