is this the face of happy?
February 25th 2007 08:48
when you're blue and you don't know where to go to....
i pondered this for a while, almost to the point where happy made me mad. why? why? why? then it all started to make sense. looking at the younger generation, they are all quite content and very enthusiastic to get on with their lives. no problem with emotions there, maybe. however from watching how the older generation operate within the community, by how they walk and hold themselves, how they look at me - whether that is because i am young or westerner not sure-, to their work ethic within their own culture it all has an expressionless front. they are hard working people that don't seem to have much else, except their families.
this led me to think of why they are like this and then i realised that these people would have been around (obviously) during the 1950s, and are the face of history in more ways than one. the face of a past war. unlike at home where uncle such and such served in the second world war, or granddad whoever served in vietnam, these people experienced first-hand a full meltdown of their lives during the resistance to the communism regime that is still present within the north of the country. they have had to rebuild from nothing to where they are today, and have been through, i would imagine, many personal battles and hardships. and now they live in a world that in a sense has left them behind.
now instead of feeling like an alien to them, i am developing a sense of empathy for this generation of people. also i can see the motivation behind the 'happy' push, as strange as it may be. so here we are 50 odd years on and there is still this ghost of a recent human atrocity, with an entire race of people left with many harsh memories. it makes me project this situation on to the families of the iraq war and that they are going through this in the present. the lingering scars or warfare.
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