#also breaking the fourth wall about the queue lmfaoo
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radiofreesanjak · 3 days ago
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Normally I try to speak about something that comes to mind once per day, a small commentary on the ways to the new era. But today the sun is warm, the wind is cool, and the birds sing proudly in the trees above the studio.
I'll instead take a moment today to tell you a story:
I was born in the mines, but I was one of the last people to remember childhood there. It's been a while since Sanjak has become free, and since then I have had the great joy to see children born and raised who have no knowledge of our time underground.
This is a source of great joy, but it is also a rift. They will come to me and they will ask me questions of what it was like when I was their age and I will tell them: I grew up in the mines. Things were different there.
They, too, learn history. They ask questions of the nobility that reveal a lack of understanding for the concept. The hierarchy of blood is foreign to them. To explain it is always an interesting trial with myself: I would deny none who seek knowledge the ability to find it, but to explain them faithfully is a trial against myself. (The noble would say they do not view themselves as better, merely suited for different things. But when the things they are suited to deserve luxury, and the things we are suited to are for the dirt, how is that not an assignment of value? This is not a nuance children foreign to the concept typically understand.)
Teaching the children of the mines is always a process. We tell them of the place we lived for so long, what it was like, the floods, the isolation, the denial of basic sunlight. One year, a group of children took it upon themselves to learn this trial by experience, and I remember holding a young child as they sobbed into my arms telling me of the horrors of the dark. "I know of this, dear." I said. "This is what we fought to save you from."
I do not blame them the curiosity but it is odd to feel such a combination of relief and horror. The children do not know of the mines, and this is the future we fought so hard to see. Because the children do not know but see the way it weighs on us, they sometimes take an empathetic leap in order to understand us better, and in the pain they experience at seeing a fraction of what we had to endure, I find myself drawn to tears about what was taken from me.
There many things to take away from this, I suppose. The first we did was to make it harder for them to access the old mineshafts. The rest I find myself thinking on on days like these, when the sun is warm and mild and the wind blows softly and the old horrors seem a distant nightmare.
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