Oh to be an Imagineer!

Second night of binging on House of Cards, after a long day of being indoors doing a tedious seminar.

It's interesting having writers added to the mix, a novelist and a journalist, after the murder of the last writer who grew close to the main characters. Journalism being the 4th estate in our governance, the show must keep going back to the reporters and writers. Newsroom and West Wing had the same dynamics; safe guards, snarky sneaks, stealthy moles,  whistle blowers and truth seekers.

What's also interesting is that politics and publishing both require imagination and courage. When I was growing up, our generation looked up to the Investigative Journalists, being the generation who followed Watergate. Then it seemed with technological and cable advances, people turned to film and the web. Now there are either a few conglomerates who control the news or a zillion fractured sources competing to be read, taken seriously and may or may not be truly fact-checked or edited.

Then we get into the ideas of memory and reality, and where the two meet. Power of recall, with a story often told and slightly tweaked over the years can alter the facts of real events. Power of suggestion can lend itself to the better story, that as Frank Underwood states, gets to a deeper truth.

How do we as private individuals and politicians as public entities, forge our own myths and histories?  How do the tales we retell, recall and recollect become who we are? To ourselves, our families and our futures? How do we re-member ourselves and pass that down to the next generation or to the history books?

Currently the City of Boston is grappling with the decision to include the bussing from 40 years ago as a part of the history curriculum taught in all Boston Public Schools. How do they make it reflect, reframe and, perhaps, resolve the tensions from the 1970's into measurable lesson for today's youth? They are looking to Birmingham, AL for advice, as that city has taught it's own history successfully, with balance and layers from multiple points of view. Sort of like all German students having Holocaust history mandatory in their grade schools.

Histories of nations, movements and families require due diligence. What to leave in, what to take out, and what to conjure for the sake of the "deeper truth", that may not be factual, but is right.

Tomorrow, I'm going to write earlier in the day, not the last thing before I go to bed. Also after I finish the complete season of House of Cards, go for a hike with dogs and perhaps a swim with my gal pal. The need to get out in nature both inspires and feeds the imagination, memory and provides me with the strength to be courageous with my own deeper truths.

Good Night, Imagineers, G'night!