A glimpse of history?

The thing about history is, you never really know when it’s being made right before your eyes.
Oh, sure, the folks at the Ford Theater knew that when Lincoln was shot it was historic.
And the men storming up Omaha Beach knew they were part of something larger, something that people would be writing about for generations.
But sometimes, the making of history is a little more uncertain, a little more mundane, with a little more skepticism dropped in.
One of the reasons it’s so difficult to discern, for certain, who developed the first American automobile is that, at the time, the witnesses thought they were just looking at some crank with a contraption. Was it Elwood Haynes? Was it Frank Duryea? Was it some eccentric we’ve never heard of who was puttering around in his horse barn?
So, have I just witnessed history?
I think so. Others are not so sure.
I’m in the fourth week of a four-week project as a Fulbright Specialist, working in Myanmar/Burma. (I have used the terms interchangeably for weeks. So have the citizens of Myanmar/Burma I have worked with.)
Though I have three more follow-up visits to participants in my seminar and one day dedicated to a newspaper that couldn’t send a participant, the start of my week is dominated by a seminar.
The very fact that the seminar is being held is historic.
It’s being paid for by Western interests, but the co-sponsor is the Myanmar Ministry of Information, the guys in charge of censorship. The bad guys.
But, suddenly, they’re not necessarily so bad.
Over about the past 14 months, the government — which has been hardline for at least 20 years — has initiated an opening.
Even the thought of a conference on media development in Myanmar would have been laughable a year and a half ago, yet here we are talking about just those issues and the Ministry of Information is part of the mix.
But holding the conference isn’t the history-making I’m talking about.
It’s what happened the afternoon of the first day.
Anyone who has ever attended a convention or a conference will tell you that the first session after lunch is the one where people doze off.
Not this time.
During an amazing discussion, a key figure in the Ministry of Information outlined proposed legal changes being prepared for the parliament that would:
•End censorship.
•Ease restrictions on the licensing of new publications.
•Allow for the first non-government-owned daily newspaper in more than two generations.
•And change the mission of the Ministry of Information to one of public service messages and copyright control.
My response was a dropped jaw. This is stuff no one could have imagined three months ago, and I guess I was prepared — probably because I was so surprised — to give the bad guys the benefit of the doubt.
They were saying all the right things.
Sure, it has to pass parliament, and as anyone who has spent 15 minutes looking at Congress knows, the legislative process is not a pretty thing.
But these are things that haven’t been talked about in Myanmar/Burma for generations.
My journalist friends here are more skeptical than I am.
After all, they’ve seen colleagues imprisoned. They know that many of the best and brightest of their country had to flee.
So on this bright March day, was history made? Or was it not?
Who is right, the perpetually optimistic American or the local reporter whose skepticism long ago morphed into cynicism?
Historians know the answer: Time will tell.

[[In-content Ad]]