Headline May 23, 2015/ ''' THE TIME-MACHINE - JUST BACKWARDS '''

''' THE TIME-MACHINE - 

JUST BACKWARDS '''

Till My Good Gets Better - And My Better Best.

GO tinker and to tailor................the whole AXACT to exact,

With my flag at half-mast.......and all these turbans to upset.

GO steal me a degree..............for my future to really   zest.

Let Harvard, Yale, Columbia,..... forever  bemoan my   fest.

What is the good point......for all learning,....just to ever be,

My craving for this hunger  at a crestfallen  misty.........free.

AND THIS ALL I WRITE, for the world, to know & even feast.

TILL MY GOOD GETS BETTER,... AND MY BETTER  BEST.

With respectful dedication, The New York Times, Federal Bureau of Investigation {FBI], Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, Pakistan's Minister of Interior, Federal Investigation Agency [FIA] and the Board of Directors AXACT.  

So, with this, time enough to intermingle with a very great gentleman and writer:

Mirages, shadows, specters: the stuff of memory. How we remember; as nations and as individuals is critical.

AS WE GROW OLDER,  the past just swivels, pours, and looms larger. There is more and more of it. The past is full of possibility.

There was Mariam, Rabo, Dee, Hussain, Haider, Ali, Sameen, Haleema, Paras, Sorat, Aqsa, Talat, Saima, Anum,  -all bright, all cheerful, smiling mischief, books, satchel bags, cross bands, and vigour, and then a crimson mist.

Past swirled and swung, to an ever-changing, an eddying tide, subject to the gusts, -and lacunas, -of memory. Yes, Mariam fainted! O,OhI Mariam overshot her home, bus stop. Mariam has gone into a swoon?

The future may seem wan by comparison, and for each of us, we know more or less where it ends. With a bang or a whimper, Henry Jame's ''distinguished thing'' awaits us.

Who, a friend asked me the other day, would ever want to be 90? The answer is somebody aged 89. And Old age is not for sissies, my grandmother liked to comment. Nor, however, is the other option.

So on we go, accumulating past with reckless abandon, like  children/students guzzling candies. Yet as Faulkner observed, ''The past is never dead. It's not even past.''

The past is potent, subject to manipulation. Wars nearly always involve memory trafficked into inflammatory myth. At Sam daily times, we try to understand, evoke and make vivid the present.

We are the sum of our lived moments. It's worth turning time's arrows backward.

All students wanted to tell stories, the inner within the outer, the intimate secreting the universal. Some liked to be the outsider looking in.

Often the stories were about the lives swept away in the gale of history; the children of Beirut in 1983 who could not sleep without the famuliarand so reassuring sound of gunfire.

A Polish priest who discovered in middle age that he was a Jew entrusted by his Nazi murdered parents to a Catholic family; Argentine twins stolen at birth from their murdered student mother by a childless junta officer.

Mixed Bosnian families broken asunder by the boozy Serb killers who injected the virus of sectarian hatred into Sarajevo; a German woman loath to contemplate her beautiful blue eyes because they reminded her of a former Nazi concentration camp commander, her father. 

''I first began to think seriously about the ferocious force of the pastas a war correspondent covering Yugoslavia's destruction.

The Serbs who threw hundreds of thousands Muslims out of their homes had been whipped to nationalist frenzy. They had been convinced by a cynical leader that these-

Secular Bosnia Muslims, so recently part of the same country called Yugoslavia, indistinguishable in fact, were a reincarnation of the Turks of old, latter-day Ottomans determined to affix the crescent moon of Islam to the Church spires of Christian Europe.

When the past is suppressed, memory becomes explosive. Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats re-enacted, in the  1990's, the civil war horrors of the 1940's whose mention had become taboo under the camp of Tito's postwar Communist dictatorship.

When the past is cultivated at the expense of the present, memory become a blind alley.

Those keys to long-lost Palestinian olive groves are now open-sesames only to further violence.

When the past overwhelms, it can turn victim into oppressor behind a shield called:

''Never Again."

The Honour and Serving of this  "human operational research'' continues. Thank you all for reading, and maybe, learning.

This all I dedicate to all the Parents of the world. To Mariam, Rabo, Aqsa, Haider's great parents, and great humans.

And to the loving memory of all the parents of my classmates. Most of whom I met, most of whom I remember and to my principal:

Hugh Catchpole M.A, (Oxon).

Nobody in the world deserved more, the title of, Sir.

'''Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless