Travel with me if you will to a time in the not so distant future. Let's say we travel to 2168. It is a mere 150 years into time where the likelihood of anyone currently reading this still being alive is nil.
Life in 2168 will obviously be much different than our current times. Perhaps daily transportation will actually have taken to the skies, maybe earth will not be our only choice in living and vacationing destinations and hopefully mankind will have exceeded 2018 in their ability to stomp out the deadly diseases of both the body and society.
It is likely that if we were to actually jump ahead, we would not even recognize the world in 2168. Their slang, fashion and ideals would assuredly be vastly different and likely these future beings would have no real grasp on who we were in 2018 as a civilization or a people. In fact, the only thing left of us and the foot print of our existence will be the literature, art, architecture and statues we leave behind. These are the things that tell the future world that we were here, that we existed and without us.....for better or worse....that they would not be here.
Now let's take this one step further and let's imagine that in 2168, they have their own ideas about how the world should be and their own "political correctness" if you will and the past (our current world) doesn't fit with their view. What if they decided because 9/11 or Vietnam or the Obama administration didn't fit in with their "current" belief system that they would just gloss over them in history books or simply make no reference to them at all? What if Martin Luther King Jr's personal life was looked into and something was found that the people of 2168 found unseemly and therefore his statues were unceremoniously and disrespectfully yanked down and all of his good works, his dreams and his fighting for this country were down played and lost to future generations?
What if F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce or William Faulkner were authors pulled from shelves and their works banned because their writing was not in keeping with the ideals or morality of the up and coming times? What if the art of Pablo Picaso, Georgia O'Keefe and even Andy Warhol were pulled from museums and hidden from the world because they spoke of a time chosen to be forgotten or they saw the world in a way that 2168 found distasteful or at odds with the world they choose to currently believe in?
What if the people of our time such as President John F. Kennedy, Mahatma Gandhi or General Norman Schwarzkopf were either bastardized or written out of history completely? And what if the civil rights movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the election of the first black president were made unimportant or the history of the events were dissected and rewritten to fit the modern worlds way of thinking? What if our world of 2018 became falsified, denied and forgotten in history?
Sadly we don't have to wait for the future for these things to happen. Right here, right now we are doing this. Works of literature are being pulled from shelves and banned because their ideology and modern day ideology don't mesh. Historic figures and symbols are being brought down and destroyed and history itself is being glossed over, reinvented or completely written out of our kids history books because we don't like what the past says about us as a people or more over, we don't want to admit that people regardless of the day and age are human and therefore capable of both good and bad. What is wrong with us?
The fact is, our history is rich with stories of hard working people who have fought to make lives for themselves. Have we all always been on equal ground? No. Since the beginning of time, man in his desire to rise above his particular circumstance has always found it necessary to step on others and at some point in history, every race, creed and color has been viewed as "less than", property or slave labor. This goes clear back to the earliest of times. It is part of the frailty of man, the ego, the desire to have it all....regardless of who suffers. With it though, there have been great times in our history when great men fought and died for what they viewed as good and right. Every age has had its good history and it's bad and each was full of people of the time writing, drawing and living life as they saw it, felt it and existed in it. The language of the time may not be the same as ours, in fact by today's standards it might even be viewed as insensitive, disrespectful or racist.....but at that time.....it was how these people spoke to and about one another and what is seen as wrong to us now, was simply life to all back then. Good or bad it was a part of our history and something that has to be recognized not glossed over or ignored. In the words of George Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." By denying and running from our past and our history, it doesn't mean we can avoid it, it simply means we are missing out on knowing key facts about what went right and what went wrong and maybe how to fix those things in the future.
When I hear of books such as the Laura Ingalls Wilder series possibly being taken from our shelves and her name being stripped from the prestigious Laura Ingalls Wilder Award because she talked about Native Americans, then known as Indians, in the only way she knew how, I am sad. Wilder wrote of what she knew back then. She was not being racist, cruel or insensitive. She was writing about a time that people of today could not possibly understand. She was writing about a life that was hard in a new nation where people were trying to find their way. In the world she knew, Indians were the enemy and to be feared. She wrote what her world at the time was like and for us to view it as more than that is simply ridiculous.
Like it or not, our history is made up of good people and bad people. It is made up of slave owners, abolitionists, free thinkers, religious zealots, the Confederate flag, outlaws, thieves, soldiers, people who stood up for what they thought was right and people who perpetuated bad for their own personal gain. And even in today's world, much of this remains. Good or bad, each day we make history. Not all of it is something to be proud of, but it is how we learn, how we grow and how we move forward.
Today we write, draw and create our world based on what we know and on what society dictates. We are leaving behind a legacy with each breath we take in hopes that the future generations can pull from the good we leave behind and understand that in our humanity we are imperfect creatures who make mistakes.....but our mistakes, just like the good we leave are part of our history and simply should not be forgotten.
Loved to read this blog.
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