Tuesday, March 08, 2016

Peril to Shun History


South Dakota, with a really significant American Indian population, ended the teaching of the first hundred years of American history at the beginning of this school year, through its State Board of Education.

There were hearings, but no legislation.

The idea seems to be, if we don't talk about it, then it never happened.

In Dearborn Michigan, where Muslims are significant minority of the population, the truth of the Holocaust that killed millions of Jews, Roman Catholics, Gypsies and homosexuals... Is no longer mentioned or even acknowledged as a historical event in any public education in that city. In Dearborn Michigan, for school attendees K-12, there WERE NO gas chambers, mass shootings, or
lime pits.

Just as the grisly history of  cannibalism, torture and massacre by both European Americans and native Indian Americans is terra non grata for social science teachers in South Dakota.

The ultimate result of the deterioration in the way Americans look at what happened before they were born is... Vacuous Ignorance.

In Washington DC, already, the people who live there do not know where the city got its name. CLICK HERE FOR EVIDENCE

It would be easy just to yawn and discard this blog in file 13 because it is cobbled together by a nonagenarian admittedly clinging to relevance through agile pomposities.

But if you didn't have the thoughts and tales, the laughter and tears... And the lessons from former generations in your family, your intellect and your spirit would be husks of dusty nothingness. Only the fool who thinks he will never make a mistake (and thus never learn)  could believe that trashing all our yesterdays  in a vain attempt to escape the basic error and fallibility that makes humans the learning machines and the conscious, constant mental and spiritual revolutionaries  that make all History , and burnish it with endless capacity for invention and renewal.

Surely if we turn our back on the lessons inherent in our ancestors' pitfalls and the glory of their endurance we are sentencing all our offspring and theirs to a Hell not dreamed of by Dante Allighieri or any of his vapid imitators.

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