No More
By Roger Ringer
I’M NOT THE SORT TO BACK AWAY FROM A FIGHT.
I DON’T BELIEVE IN SHRINKING FROM ANYTHING.
IT’S NOT MY SPEED; I’M NOT A GUY WHO MEETS
ADVERSITIES HEAD ON.
John Wayne
Lets face it I am getting tired. History has been my chief interest and pursuit for many years. I have been influenced by two great history teachers and my lifelong study of history has been affected by and in spite of them. The most positive direction came from them making the history interesting and relevant. But they were not flawless. It seems that the quality of the texts even them was not very good but they took it beyond that. But they gave me the basic and the ability to find the facts.
I graduated in 1973 and soon afterward the talk about revising history books started. And at that time I started talking and writing about it. The book 1984 was hot at that time and the scenario for what is happening today was written there as fiction. But it was prophetic.
There is nothing wrong with correcting what is wrong but it is wrong to put the political views of our time into the history books. History is what it is and should not be judged by our standard other than to do things the right way. You have to remember that the historians that wrote about the Battle of the Little Big Horn was influenced by a Budweiser painting of the event.
You will remember that the history books and what has been taught for over 100 years is that ‘there were no survivors of the battle’. Except about 5000 Indians. It was not until the 1970’s that the accounts of the Indians were starting to be recorded. That and a huge wildfire over the battle site rewrote the narrative of Custer’s Last Stand.
I was at the Acoma Indian Pueblo in New Mexico and the woman that owned it took me on the tour by myself. The Acoma is a Matriarchal society. As we were looking over the eastern wall at a line of hills she told me that “that is where we lived before moving the pueblo here.” She smiled and told me that “white historians wonder where the Anasazi went when they abandoned the cliff dwellings, We moved.”
If you have never been taught what mistakes and realities that history teaches us you are doomed to repeat them. Yet what student knows this when they have not been taught about it.
History is the truth of the past, not the wishful opinions of a professor, activist, or group. The history of the world is brutal. If you think that tearing down statues makes any difference you are a real case of huberis.
So how to affect the record of history now? Have thousands of protesters, rioters, and demonstrators go around the so called restrictions of the virus and then when the spike comes blame it on bar goers?
How about a little truth in reporting?
Not convenient?
