Last evening i watched the first of four documentary shows on Showtime dealing with the recent history (1950 onwards) of the Supreme Court.
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What i found intriguing was the fact that i was living during this period, but i only had a vague understanding of the significance of that history at the time. I was young, living in a rural, small town environment where big things did not happen. My parents were democrats, but not strident democrats. It simply was not conducive to one's work in Indiana to be a strident democrat.
I was lucky, however, when i was young because we did travel (Florida, New England, California) on our vacations. These trips opened one's perspective on things--just like a day in Chicago would. On those trips South we saw the Jim Crow way of life. In Indiana we saw the Impeach Earl Warren billboards. Indiana was where Robert Kennedy told a crowd about Martin Luther King's death. The town in which i lived was the only town in the county that "allowed Negros to live, and even then we had a "nigger pier" away from the "public pier" on the natural lake that the Indians called Lake Maxinkuckee.
My point is this. Looking back at the history during one's life is an "eye-opener". Only the aged can appreciate the historical accomplishments made during one's life--the young could care less about that history--history is old news--it's time to move forward and quit looking back, so say the young.
In our youth, we said the same thing. In your youth we want to change the path of history. In your aging years, now we want history to show everything that was accomplished in order to put things into perspective. The two different perspectives are always clashing against each other.
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Well, let me tell you something. The civil rights achievements made in the 1950s and 1960s were significant! Really significant! And that effort, in that time period, did more to improve the state of our nation than just about anything else in the past seventy-some years.
It's this aged perspective of history that helps one solve "current problems" without making the mistakes of the past.
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At the moment it seems that we have two likely candidates to choose from in 2024. One candidate knows history and the other candidate knows little of history (U.S. history or otherwise). You can make your own choice, but i am putting my eggs behind the guy who does know history--not just U.S. history, but international history, too.
I wrote a good article once (believe it or not) entitled History Is Not Bunk Unless Someone Important Says It Is So.
Regardless, we are better off when we try to understand our history than we are when we ignore it. Many people before us, made this country great, let's not forget them, nor our past.
