The Answer to Why I Love Writing About the American Revolution

This is not really a piece to be posted on this blog, but it is for anyone who thinks I'm obsessed with the American Revolution. I felt that it was the simplest way to tell the BIMA '08 writers the following message, even if anyone is yelling at me to sod off for using blog space for something he or she might think unnecessary.

I was never obsessed with the American Revolution. The word "obsession" comes from the Latin root "obsessio, -onis" a blockade, a blocking up, a siege. The Unabridged Random House Dictionary defines obsession as the domination of one's thoughts or feelings by a persistant idea, image, desire, etc. I can confidentally now say that I am not obsessed with it for the following reasons.

First of all, my thoughts are not being blocked by the A.R. It is not taking over me. It is not a point of frustration for me. It is not a restriction I have imposed upon my writing. It is not a passing fancy (and I've gone through two-six month obsessions before ith different periods in history, such as ancient Rome, the Golden Age of pirates, and the dinosaurs). Above all, it is not an interest.

For me, the AR is a way of life. It is part of who I am. I share its memories. Although I was not alive during that period, it is still part of me. I am not denying anything when I say this. The AR was a part of my soul that had to be discovered, and now that I have discovered it, I am responsbile for nurturing that part of my soul.

Then why do I write about it and not just learn about it? Let me sidetrack for a moment to a memory from the AR. In a book by David Hackett Fischer, a professor at Brandeis University, Paul Revere's Ride, he describes the following scene: It is April nineteenth, 1775, two or three in the morning. Militiamen all across Massachusetts are receiving the alarm that "The Regulars are out!" and they are doing what they've signed up for: getting ready within a minutes notice. As one man is about the leave his family to join his company, he and his wife make eye contact. Then he says, "Take good care of the children." She never sees him again. True story.

Why should that affect me? Because I know how it feels to lose someone I love; a boy I once loved died and I remember lying in bed, night after night, crying, "Santi, my love!" (his name was Santiago). When I saw that I was connected to that woman who was alive over two hundred years ago, I recognized that if I didn't tell the stories of those men and women who lived during the AR, then I am personally responsible for forgetting how much blood was shed so that, as Ester Forbes wrote, "a man can stand up." It is amazing what our founders, and I'm referring to the soldiers as well as the generals, were willing to do so that men could stand up.

I posted a poem a while back, "I Weep for Our Continental Soldiers." While it was not my best poem, it was part of the early realization that, as pompous and egotistic and bloody unbelieveable as it sounds, I am part of the remembrance of the AR. Please understand that when I said, "I weep," I was not joking in that I have shed tears for it, and not just while watching movies from that period.