Reincarnation

Have you ever heard of the term reincarnation? Well let me tell you that reincarnation is the philosophical or religious belief that the non-physical essence of a living being starts a new life in a different physical form or body after biological death and transformation. It is also called rebirth or transmigration. Resurrection originally had the same meaning. It transformed into a similar process hypothesized by some religions that involves coming back to life in the same body. If you compare present times with the old times, you could see so many drastic changes right from the lifestyle to the technology to the living to the food and many other things. One wants to experience all the new things happening around in the present time and wishes to get reincarnated back into the same. To me the human soul is never at rest. It wants more and more be it learning, teachings, philosophies and materials. It wants to grab hold of everything and enjoy it with happiness. I also feel that whatever teachings or learning we come to know in my now present life isn’t enough to give contentment to one’s soul. We reincarnate back into this world to learn new things, new paradigms to the existing teachings they have learnt, etc. Everyone wants to know everything what happens around them and to me one life isn’t enough to cover up all the folds and approach of those already established theories. This is one of the popular believes for reincarnation that if someone is tormenting you in your present living life it must have to do with something with your past life. It is considered that if you have inflicted any suffering or pain on someone or even an animal in your previous birth, they come back to your present life as your near and dear one to give you agonizing pain and suffering. How many times have you heard of news of people meeting their deaths at a very young age, mainly at the peak of age when they are supposed to be enjoying their childhood or going to college to try and further their education? These people meet their untimely deaths when their minds are filled with many dreams and wishes which they want to fulfill. It is deemed that a person meeting their untimely death ends up having their soul wander around the grounds without getting Moksha or salvation. Sometimes to fulfill their wishes, they reincarnate back into earth; some of us even having memories of their past life.

Well that’s what I believed happened to me. I truly believe that I lived through the 1940’s, yet I can’t say that I have any concrete proof.

In the 1940’s, black people had become accustomed to all expressions of racism but had steadfastly refused to embrace anti-black bigotry. Having endured 50 years under the egregious landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that was Plessey v. Ferguson, the decision which legalized racial segregation under the falsehood that it would foster equality, most blacks of the ‘40’s, then called “Negroes,” lived wholly separate lives from their white counterparts.

Roughly midway through the movement known as “The Great Migration,” “Negroes” still believed in and whole heartedly pursued the American Dream.

Again you will see in the 1940s was a decade of the Gregorian calendar that began on January 1, 1940 and ended on December 31, 1949.

Most of World War II took place in the first half of the decade, which had a profound effect on most countries and people in Europe, Asia and for black people living and senselessly dying in America (Lynching). The consequences of the war lingered well into the second half of the decade, with a war-weary Europe divided between the jostling spheres of influence of the Western world and the Soviet Union, leading to the beginning of the Cold War. To some degree internal and external tensions in the post-war era were managed by new institutions, including the United Nations, the welfare state and the Bretton Woods system, facilitating the post-World War II economic expansion, which lasted well into the 1970s. The conditions of the post-war world encouraged decolonization and the emergence of new states and governments, with India, Pakistan, Israel, Vietnam and others declaring independence, although rarely without bloodshed. The decade also witnessed the early beginnings of new technologies, often first developed in tandem with the war effort and later adapted and improved upon in the post-war era.

I believed that I was murdered in that war but before I met my untimely barbaric death I once lived a life of poverty and despair.

The hard times of young blacks like me residing  in the South. Racism was a big issue in the south in the 1940’s. Racism was a major issue in the south back then because of all kind of reasons for example the KKK and the laws that would make the blacks inferior to the whites in the southern society.  

I can unambiguously recall so much of what that author Richard Wright wrote in that book titled Black Boy about his own childhood. Just like him I believed that me recalling many events of that era was due the racism, Jim Crow laws and segregation.

Most people today have probably never heard of the phrase “Double Victory” that was coined to describe the ways in which Blacks involvement in World War II was both a triumph over totalitarianism abroad and prejudice at home. Nearly one million black men and women worked in industrial and defense fields but did not earn competitive wages to their white counterparts due to discrimination.

I seen myself earning 30 cents an hour that is equivalent to $5.51 in 2020. I was working as a shear operator for 12 hours a day. Six days a week.

After the United States entered World War II, it expanded the draft ages to include men 18 to 37. Blacks, initially excluded from the draft, were conscripted into the armed forces starting in 1943. “Conscientious objector” status was granted to those who could demonstrate “sincerity of belief in religious teachings combined with a profound moral aversion to war.”

I got personally, enigmatically drafted into the army in November of 1943. I was 23 years old at the time.

I vividly recall being one of the 11 bodies, that had been on the frozen ground for more than a month, covered only by a shroud of snow. On 15 February 1945, I and the other 10 black soldiers were discovered. We had been killed by blows to the head with bricks, 2 by 4 lumber and the rifle stock. The young black soldier we called Weed Head  had been stabbed repeatedly with a bayonet. The finger of one soldier was almost completely severed off for some bizarre reason. To top all that goings on we were shot multiple times.

I sometimes can’t believe why I can recall living in the 40’s especially when I know in 2020 not too much has changed for the young black man.