"Filmmaker tells BC grads to revisit history" by Eric Moskowitz, Globe Staff | May 19, 2009
See: 9/11 Revisited
CHESTNUT HILL - Speaking of "history and memory and possibilities," award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns asked Boston College graduates yesterday to mind the past, while encouraging them to draw inspiration and guidance from it at a time of seemingly daunting problems.
"History is not a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts, and events that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known truth," Burns said. "It is an inscrutable and mysterious and malleable thing. Each generation rediscovers and reexamines that part of its past that gives its present - and, most important, its future - new meaning and new possibilities."
So WHO BENEFITED from 9/11, folks?!!!
With 10,000 spectators in the stands, Burns specifically, he spoke of the anger, divisiveness, and war that subsumed national unity after Sept. 11, 2001; of the unchecked greed and consumption that contributed to "mindless consumerism" and economic collapse; of mobile technology that disengages people from one another even as it purports to connect.
"It is into that world that you now plummet, unprotected from the shelter of family and school, but drafted nonetheless into a new union army that must be committed to preserving the values, the sense of humor, the sense of cohesion that have long been our hallmark and beacon," Burns said. "But also know that you have help. These dark and divisive forces are not without their natural enemies."
That would be BLOGGERS against the NEO-CON NaZionists and their WORLD DOMINATION PLANS!!!!!!!
He urged them to seek community, to serve others, to be skeptical but not cynical, to be enthusiastic. To defend the arts, read, keep journals, visit national parks, he told them, to live, as it were, "in Bedford Falls and not Pottersville," allusions to towns mentioned in the Jimmy Stewart movie, "It's a Wonderful Life."
Thank you, readers!
