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