January 14, 2022
History. Seven letters that, when combined, are supposed to convey the story of humanity. We are taught at an early age that history is important because our nation is the shining light of human evolution. We, the United States, are the beacon of freedom—a city on a hill—calling out to the world to embrace the important values of democracy and equality.
The reality has and continues to be something far different. The reality is that our nation’s history has always been washed clean of any inconvenient truths that might shine light on the realities of what our nation has been. At best, our nation was one that had potentially powerful goals that could be reached if we collectively rejected the most nefarious sides of human nature that thrive on greed, hate, and power.
Children have been taught for decades that we are “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Once again, amazing and powerful words that, if taken literally, could lead us to be the nation so many Americans think we are.
In practice, we are a nation that has never lived up to the promise of these words. We have a history in which we enslaved humans for profit and, at the same time, counted them as ⅗ a person to ensure the political power of those who owned the slaves. We have fought the Civil War, which clearly showed not everyone in our nation’s history believed we were indivisible—and seem today to be showing that those divisions never truly went away. The sanitized version of our nation’s history is so ingrained in the minds of large parts of our population that when you point out the truth, they are unable to accept that reality and flood school board meetings with open disdain and hate for those whose American experience has never been a dream.
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