from snarkmarket:
Neil deGrasse Tyson likes to point out how it’s a mathematical certainty that the air we breathe and the water we drink passed through the lungs and kidneys (respectively) of every one who ever lived. Likewise, in these Civil War photos, both the destroyed Southern buildings (one of them a US army fort) and the Northern cannons that destroyed them result from the profits of American slavery. Amer icans like to think about victories in World War II with out thinking about the cities and people destroyed in Russia and dozens of other countries (including Japan, Italy, and Germany) that stand behind that war — in no small part because we don’t have to live with them, to walk down those streets, to feel those ghosts. But we’re haunted all the same.I just had to repost that- I love the idea of the past as ghosts, haunting us, unescapable. Shades of Robert Pirsig- we’re the sum of all the ghosts of the past. Not all of them are bad, luckily.
