In the two week period before I
joined the Baha’i Faith in early October 1959 at the age of 15 much happened in
the economic and political world. I do
not want to give a travelogue or a social analysis of all the events or the
happenings as they might appear in some annalistic, chronological history,
month by month, and especially in September and October 1959. But I will mention one or two events of
those months. Oil was discovered in China near Daqing City; Russia’s Nikita
Krushchev visited the US in one of the many confrontations of the cold war. The
Tenth Anniversary of the People's Republic of China was held in October
1959. Mao Tse-tung was replaced as
chairman by Liu Shaoqi. The Great Leap
Forward of 1958 to 1960, Mao's grand plan to organize the huge Chinese
population, was beginning to become unstuck. It became a disaster. Some 30 to
40 million starved in the period 1959-1961 due to natural disasters.
I want to mention here two other
events in Baha’i history that have a curious correlation with the history of
the Communist Party in China. The
formation date of the Communist Party in 1921 coincided with the death of
‘Abdu’l-Baha and the building of Baha’i administrative institutions by Shoghi
Effendi. The end of The Long March in October 1936 coincided
with the beginning of the Baha’i long teaching march in a series of Teaching
Plans. After an expedition of almost a
year, the Second Red Army reached Shaanxi on 22 October 1936, known in China as
the “union of the three armies” and the end of The Long March.1 By October 1936 the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of
the USA had begun trying to conceive a plan, as requested by Shoghi Effendi in
May 1936, to establish one Baha’i centre in every state and republic in the Americas.
–Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC1 TV, 14 October 2010
and “Long March,” Wikipedia, 21 October 2010.
Simple contemporaneity, some
might
say serendipitous coincidence…or
an
overlapping history
overlapping…that
awesome anarchy of one enormous
mud-puddle and my foot in one of
the puddles…And meaning---far,
far
from the eye of a dead ant--but
only
what I can endow it as I look
back at
the decades into which I was born
&
which my parents lived in had
being.
The starving China boys my mother
used to talk about to get me to
eat
my vegies--they were real enough,
even if not to me as I stared at
the
green and yellow pees and corn on
my plate and watched my mother
&
father grow old and die and then…..
.…in 1959, mirabile dictu, Mao was
beginning his slide into
obscurity &
I was beginning in that
Movement
which was slowly taking the world
by storm:
very slowly, unobtrusively, with
a grace so
contained as to pose no threat;
it captured my
heart and mind, at least part of
it, for the long
march that was my life on this
earthly plain!*
Ron Price
25 February 2007
Updated on¨21/10/’10
------------- Ron Price has been married for 47 years(in 2014) and a teacher for 35. He has been a writer and editor for 15, and a Baha'i for 55(in 2014).
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