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A HEART FOR JUSTICE's avatar

Thank you for this excellent review. You point out a lot of the problem- a lack of knowledge and a lack of education. But I have to suggest that much of that is willful and by choice. Such knowledge about the TRUTH has been censored, hidden, twisted and spun. There’s a deep sickness in our culture which discourages basic curiosity, critical thinking and question asking. So many don’t WANT to think, to consider they might have been taught lies or not taught at all. And if they get a glimpse of possible truth and reality, the admission that they might be wrong is apparently unbearable.

Admittedly it has been hard to realize over and over that my education had huge amounts of basic history that were simply left out. That my parents and other relatives just plain lied about or omitted important things in my background. But as you point out - the information is there if one is willing to seek it out. I have often said that “everything I don’t know could fill volumes” because I have been humbled by learning so many things I never knew.

I didn’t know about Japanese internments during World War II until my honeymoon when we stopped at a historical site on our road trip. I was stunned and it triggered some huge questions in me about what ELSE had I never been told. And there has been a LOT.

I had no idea how insanely racist my Mississippi raised father was until I was impregnated by a beautiful black man. I was nearly 30 before I learned the family “secret” that my gentle tenderhearted uncle was a homosexual. Growing up I didn’t even know what that word meant.

I heard the words “manifest destiny” in US history but didn’t know it meant that entitled white people were so convinced of God’s will that they massacred entire nations of indigenous people and STOLE their homeland and way of life. I admit sometimes knowledge comes at a high price. I am no longer able to feel proud of my pioneer ancestors who felt they deserved to STEAL and “settle” blood soaked land because . . . they were “christians”?

I am 68 and just learned I’m a daughter of the revolution AND those ancestors owned slaves. It doesn’t help to be told not to feel bad about the choices those people made since I wasn’t the one who did it. But for gawds sake, I wouldn’t BE here if they hadn’t!!

Anyway, I’ve always been a voracious reader and when I began to wonder, to want to know, to ask important questions I began searching for the truth about so many things. If you care at all the information is readily available. Or it has been luckily for me. There’s a good reason white supremacist “christians” want books banned. It seems far easier to just erase history than to face it and hold oneself, one’s ancestors, one’s religious affiliation, one’s political party, one’s country, accountable.

Self examination is painful. To have to admit all the dishonest, hurtful, horrific beliefs and actions I personally have been complicit with is painful.

But the thing is, for some reason I CARE. The truth MATTERS to me. No matter how painful, I want to KNOW everything about my country and my personal background. I want a just, GOOD world not just for myself but also for my children and grandchildren and neighbors and the strangers on the street.

If we want things to be different as in better and kinder and fairer then it behooves us to start being curious, start learning TRUE history.

I heard a wise saying years ago: if we always do what we’ve always done then we will always get what we’ve always gotten.

As Maya Angelou suggests, if we KNOW better then perhaps we’ll DO better. One of the questions I’ve often asked myself is how can I do better if I don’t KNOW what is worse?? Learning factual history is the only way I know of to find out.

If there is a hereafter I think we’ll be held accountable for all we refused to know, all we refused to honestly see, hear and learn. I prefer to KNOW as much as I can NOW. I don’t want to someday look in my creator’s eyes and see reflected there all the ways I could have made a difference but didn’t because I simply didn’t want to know the truth.

So again, thank you for this information you have shared. I already knew some of this but it’s helped fill in a few more gaps in my knowledge and understanding I didn’t even know were there. And it affirms the deep concern I have for all we’re up against right now and at least some of what the REAL issues are.

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Lukium's avatar

I agree with everything here. I have experienced many of these realizations myself, albeit from a different perspective. Like most people raised in another country, when I came to the US, I had an understanding of America that mirrors what much of what you described here. Even going through high school in a fairly liberal area (Manhattan), there was so much that I was never taught. Sure, they taught about slavery, about the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, etc. But there was a lack of depth, it's like someone gave you a set of Legos missing the connecting parts. There was a lack of real analysis of what it all meant when you put it all together; a lack of connection between the lessons about the past we were being taught and the struggles of our neighbors today: or the connections between the overtly discriminatory slogans and words that were used then and the heavily diffused racism (back when I was in high school at least, today it's starting to resemble much more Jim Crow than Southern Strategy dog whistles).

Abu Ghraib was the first shock for me. It fractured the foundation of everything I believed about America, shattering the illusion that most people from other countries grow up with when it comes to America. But it would take over a decade and a fair bit of effort to grasp the degree with which certain ideas are entrenched throughout American culture. Don't get me wrong, I love this country, but I love it for what it aspires to be, not what it has become.

And it's not even just the racism and discrimination that so obviously corroded our society today. Even back when I was in school, they did a good enough job to get the point across that some people are just dark inside, so even when I see ICE disappearing people these days, it hardly surprises me. What really gets me is the complacency of the "good people." It's the abandonment of Reconstruction, it's the enabling of Jim Crow, the apathy towards allowing American History to be taught, to many, as though the Confederates were anything more than slavery loving traitors who would rather have destroyed than country and were perfectly fine killing their countrymen for the right to own people. That's what gets me... I think nobody should be able to graduate high school without being to recite from memory the cornerstone paragraph from Alexander Stephen's Cornerstone speech and to explain the depths of evil that the Confederacy represented. And that should be just the start... And so, in the name of "tolerance" the "good people" allow the same evil that nearly destroyed this country to linger and metastize over and over again.

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