Kids who grew up in the 50's were certainly taught a rosy view of our
past. Into the 1960's that was still true. Then came the counter-
culture, exploring all sorts of things that were seen anything in
opposition to the stultifyingly dull, the insipid Leave It To Beaver
type of life. The bloom came off the rose and we then discovered the
downside of past hero type folks. Rather than having the maturity to
say, "whoa, these guys weren't all perfect, but they had some good in
them", that they were imperfect but did good things, we did the bi-
polar thing and consigned them to the trash heap. Was that idealism?
Perhaps. It certainly was unfortunate. We have a tendency to want to
worship the perfect and if it's slightly tarnished, it is totally
tarnished. After all, we invented the one-drop rule. Didn't matter if
you had 17 ancestors who were white, if you had one who was black,
you were classified as black. The caste system that we see as somehow
ludicrous, pathetic and totally unjust that pervaded India when we
were taught about it was never seen as part of our own past that
continues to this day. Now we look for the garbage, using that to
justify a corrosive cynicism and expect less than nothing from
anyone. That's a black hole for which some of us have passed beyond
the event horizon. Too bad for them.
Recognizing that it's an imperfect world doesn't mean we can't
participate in it. We must participate in it to make it a better
world. Extremism on both ends of the political spectrum is matter and
anti-matter and will cause destruction. Eggs get broken to make
omelets. Blood and sacrifice are part of the continual fight for
freedom. We have so much freedom in this country of ours that we
confuse freedom with anarchy.
Our discourse over the past year, had we been in China, Cuba,
Myanmar, Saudi Arabia or you pick the locale, would have ended with
us in detention for re-education or worse. That fact that we can
engage in these sometimes inane cannonades is because we have all
benefitted from sacrifices that our ancestors made. As for the dull
folks in the 1950's, most of them had been in WWII and had seen all
the action they could ever want and were quite happy, after having
sown wild oats and dragons teeth, to never have to face that again.
We did not learn those lessons and thought them limited in their
outlook. They'd seen the elephant so we didn't have to see it.
But, external events loomed, as they always do and we have had to
learn all over again how to be men and women. We can but try.
Lyle Browning
On May 24, 2007, at 12:21 AM, Paul Heinegg wrote:
> The history taught at U.S. universities must have changed
> drastically since I attended school in the 1960s. I was never
> taught this "PC" history. For instance, it was rarely if ever
> mentioned that many of our great and glorious leaders were
> slaveowners--that they held other human beings as their property,
> like farm animals. (If we had not been slaveowners ourselves, how
> would our history books have described this uncivilzed behavior in
> other societies?)
>
> Our history never spoke of Columbus's genocide, never questioned
> later U.S. interference in South America, Woodrow Wilson's racism,
> or anything remotely negative about the U.S. As I stated in a
> previous post, my senior class could not think of any immoral act
> which the U.S. had committed in its entire history. What mistakes
> were we supposed to learn from?
> Paul
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