Children of the Days by Eduardo Galeano Page B

said: “Here, the only thing wrong is everything.”
    And in the year 1948 he disbanded the armed forces.
    Many were those who decried it as the end of the world, or at least the end of Costa Rica.
    But the world kept on turning, and Costa Rica was kept safe from wars and coups d’état.

December 2
I NTERNATIONAL D AY FOR THE A BOLITION OF S LAVERY
    In the middle of the nineteenth century, John Brown, a white traitor to his race and class, led an assault on a military arsenal in Virginia to get weapons for the slaves on the plantations.
    Colonel Robert E. Lee commanded the troops that surrounded and captured Brown. Lee was promoted to general and soon came to lead the army that defended slavery during the long US war between the South and the North.
    Lee, general of the slavers, died in bed. His send-off included military honors, martial music, cannon salutes and speeches that exalted the virtues of “the greatest military genius in America.”
    Brown, friend of the slaves, was convicted of murder, conspiracy and treason for his assault on the arsenal, and was sentenced to die. He was hanged on this day in 1859.
    Today, which by coincidence is the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery.

December 3
T HE K ING W HO S AID “N O M ORE ”
    For four centuries black Africa specialized in the sale of human flesh. In the international division of labor, Africa’s fate was to produce slaves for the world market.
    In 1720 one king refused.
    Agaja Trudo, king of Dahomey, set fire to the Europeans’ forts and razed the slave ports to the ground.
    For ten years he fought off harassment from the traffickers and attacks from neighboring kingdoms.
    He could hold out no longer.
    Europe refused to sell him weapons if he did not pay in human coin.

December 4
G REEN M EMORIES
    Like us, trees remember.
    But unlike us, they do not forget: they grow rings in their trunks, one after another, to stockpile their memory.
    The rings tell the story of each tree, revealing its age, as much as two thousand years in some cases, the climate it lived through, the floods and droughts it endured; the rings conserve the scars of fires, infestations and earthquakes.
    One day like today, a scholar of the subject, José Armando Boninsegna, was given the best possible explanation by the children at a school in Argentina:
    â€œLittle trees go to school and learn to write. Where do they write? On their bellies. And how do they write? With rings that you can read.”

December 5
T HE L ONGING FOR B EAUTY
    The president of the Spanish Society of Natural History ruled in 1886 that the cave paintings at Altamira were not thousands of years old: “They are the work of some mediocre disciple of today’s school of modern art,” he insisted, confirming the suspicions of nearly all the experts.
    Twenty years later, those experts had to admit they were wrong. Thus it was proven that the longing for beauty, like hunger, like desire, has always accompanied the human adventure in the world.
    Many years before that thing we call civilization, we were turning bird’s bones into flutes and seashells into necklaces, we were making colors by mixing earth, blood, powdered rocks and plant juices to beautify our caves and turn our bodies into walking paintings.
    When the Spanish conquistadors arrived at Veracruz, they found the Huasteco Indians walking around naked, she’s and he’s, with their bodies painted to please each other and themselves.
    â€œThese are the worst,” concluded the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo.

December 6
A L ESSON IN T HEATER
    On this day in 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, operating out of Washington, questioned Hallie Flanagan.
    She ran the Federal Theatre Project.
    Joe Starnes, a congressman from Alabama, led the interrogation.
    Referring to an article Hallie had written, he asked: “You are quoting from this Marlowe. Is he a