A Travel Video Postcard from Concord to North Africa:
The rude bridge that arched the flood, Revolutions in North Africa,
Tahrir Square, Libya, Travel Video Postcard
It was a pilgrimage of sorts, this visit to the old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts, where one of the first battles of the American Revolution took place on April 19th 1775
I wanted to reclaim something, at the Old North Bridge.
The patriotic pulse of a childhood growing up near this iconic place had gone resoundingly flat in the sixties.
I wanted to see, if returning to Concord I might feel a flutter that would connect me to brothers and sisters in the Arab world, Tahrir Square, Libya who were demonstrating for, fighting and dying for a freedom we have long taken for granted.
I asked a woman with a camera what brought her to Concord, to the Old North Bridge today. “I’ve never been, and I happened to be nearby…so I thought might as well…” “but” I ventured “does it make you feel anything about what’s happening in the Arab world?”
Her stare was blank at first, then “oh, I see what you mean,, like Egypt”
I smiled yes.. and so much more. I thought)
Then I was alone with the rude bridge, and still.
Across the stream a man and child approach He was from Ghana, and we stood together with the first dead Isaac Davis and Emerson’s poem.
By the Rude bridge that arched the flood
Their flag to Aprils breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
and fired the shot heard round the world
I with my Mayflower eyes, he with deep brown eyed disappointment. “What has happened to this country?” the African voice said “ you fought so hard against tyranny… what do you value now”
