If the reactionaries on the Jefferson County
School Board get their way, American History will be reduced to a ridiculous
nothing of a few wars--far more than those I mentioned above would get the
Jefferson County School Board's axe--and the exaltation of the positive side of
the plutocratic oligarchs who have existed in every era in this country.
Students will never hear of their ongoing but barely thwarted attempts to
establish an oligarchic state: from the Presidency of John Adams and the
Federalists failure at the dawn of our Republic; The Gilded and Jazz age
excesses that were barely thwarted by the Presidencies of Theodore and Franklin
Roosevelt; to today's subversion of our nation through campaign finance
anarchy, permitted by a Supreme Court whose majority is completely subservient
to the interests of our plutocratic oligarchs, which I believe is leading to
the greatest Constitutional Crisis since Watergate, perhaps even since the Civil War
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in that 18 December 1963 speech, at Western Michigan University I mentioned earlier, made the following statement:
"Now the other myth that gets around is the idea that legislation cannot really solve the problem and that it has no great role to play in this period of social change because you've got to change the heart and you can't change the heart through legislation. You can't legislate morals. The job must be done through education and religion. Well, there's half-truth involved here. Certainly, if the problem is to be solved then in the final sense, hearts must be changed. Religion and education must play a great role in changing the heart. But we must go on to say that while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also. So there is a need for executive orders. There is a need for judicial decrees. There is a need for civil rights legislation on the local scale within states and on the national scale from the federal government."
But government and citizens cannot move to right the wrongs against the few, if they are unaware of the evil that is being perpetrated against that minority. This is what the Jefferson County School Board cannot seem to understand. Evil can be defeated only if it is opposed. It will be opposed if, and only if, people of good will are aware of its existence. This can only be done when the minority protests its immoral treatment at the hands of those in power. You cannot judge the present if you do not know the past, or the righteousness of a protest based on the principle of a misquoting of Stephen Decatur's famous toast, "My Country, in its relations with other nations may it always be right, but My Country, Right or Wrong." The TV and magazine pictures of the use of fire hoses and vicious police dogs in Selma, Alabama, incensed a nation against nearly one hundred years of institutionalized bigotry and hatred in the former South. Millions of Americans said as one: Jim Crow had to go! Dr. King concluded his speech at Western Michigan University with the following words [amplifications in brackets]:
"In spite of the difficulties of this hour, I am convinced that we have the resources to make the American Dream a reality. I am convinced of this because I believe Carlyle is right: 'No lie can live forever.' I am convinced of this because I believe William Cullen Bryant is right: 'Truth pressed to earth will rise again.' I am convinced of this because I think James Russell Lowell is right: 'Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne; Yet that scaffold sways the future, And behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, Keeping watch above His own.' Somehow with this faith, we will be able to adjourn the councils of despair and bring new life into the dark chambers of pessimism. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation to a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. This will be a great day. This will be the day when all of God's children, black [people] and white [people], Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God, Almighty, we are free at last!'"
The truth, even if it is ugly, will set you free. A lie, no matter how beautifully crafted, binds you like a hangman's noose; choking the life out of you, and all that you love, leaving only death and decay in its wake. The history that the reactionaries on the Jefferson County School Board wishes taught is not history, it is propaganda. Yes, we need to teach about the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Walter Reed and the fight against Yellow Fever, and every other pure, unalloyed triumph in American History. But we must also teach about our most cynical and malevolent acts, as well as our failures: from slavery, to our treatment of the Native American peoples; from the horrible avarice that has driven the American rich to exploit their workers and turn parts of our country into uninhabitable wastelands, to the times we have made arrogant mistakes that have cost thousands of lives, such as Pearl Harbor and September 11th. Only in learning all of our history, the good and the bad, do we have a chance of not repeating it. It is time for We the People of the United States to choose the whole truth, over lies, whether by omission or intent, before it's too late.
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