Saw an older factually based movie the other night called “Geronimo,” based on the wartime years of his life concluding with his surrender and what was left of his Apache tribe being transported out of Arizona to Florida to be prisoners of war for the rest of their lives.
It was the end of a way of life that had existed for thousands of years. He speculated that there were just too many white eyes, horses and guns for them to overcome. These elements are what could be called forces of changing life.
This past week I visited Selma, Ala., and walked over part of the Edmund Pettis Bridge where the freedom march riot occurred. Afterward we drove around the declining city that has half the population that it had 60 years ago. The upheaval caused white flight that has left the city in economic ruins and there is no remedy that will reverse the trend. I talked with relatives in Mobiel that used to live in the area of middle Alabama, and they said back in the 1950s, rural residents and towns within 60 miles of Selma used to go there on shopping trips.
These two situations could be like what folks my age are facing, in that the world that existed for our lifetime based on the production of goods and services is melting under our feet to a world of electronics and information and like Geronimo, who could not adjust to a world of farming instead of nomadic hunting, and the people of Selma who could not compromise their way of a plantation society, nothing can turn back the sands of time.
