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Self-righteous assaults on America's history make the U.S. a lesser nation
Self-righteous assaults on America's history makes the U.S. a lesser nation
07/08/2019 ~ By Allan C. Brownfeld
WASHINGTON: In recent days, we have seen an escalation in assaults upon American history. Nike’s knee-jerk removal of sneakers displaying the 13-star Betsy Ross flag due to the complaints of Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick, a former NFL football player is a Nike spokesperson. What is Kaepernick’s complaint about the flag? A few far-right groups waived it. At almost the same time, the city of Charlottesville, Virginia decided that it would no longer celebrate the birthday of Thomas Jefferson. Moreover, the city of San Francisco announced that it would spend $600,000 to paint over a mural depicting the life of George Washington. In the case of the Betsy Ross flag, there is no connection to slavery. For one Ross was a feminist of her time. She was also an anti-slavery Quaker. The first flag of the United States was about uniting a new country Mark Pitcavage, a senior fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, says: “We view it as essentially an innocuous historical flag. It’s not a thing in the white supremacist movement.” Lisa Moulder, Director of the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia, says of the flag that, “I’ve always seen it as a representation of early America, a society that was not perfect and is not perfect today.”
Those who would topple statues and paint over murals because those who created our country were not perfect. Because those who have come before us were imperfect human beings, as are we today. We celebrate them for their achievements, in spite of their faults and shortcomings. In totalitarian societies, we have seen groups like the Nazis, the Red Guard, and the Taliban burn books, topple statues and destroy paintings. We should not permit those in our present-day society, a small but vocal group, to succeed in imitating such destructive behavior.
Comment:
History and culture were never subjects of great interest or subjects taken seriously in the United States. Overall our nation is oriented toward gadgets and short term matters. Most Americans do not grasp the historical fact that it took over 500 years from the time of Magna Carta to the middle of the 18th century for England to even reach the outskirts of democracy. The English speaking nations did not get there until the late 19th century.
If democracy was hard for the English speaking nations to achieve think of how difficult it must be in the Middle East or Asia where they never ever had a democratic tradition.
Even in Greece, where democracy was invented, they never had a firm grasp on it. After Pericles and the loss of the Peloponnesian Wars Athenian democracy went belly up when Alexander whipped them.
History shows that these nations each had their Achilles heels none were pure or perfect and all had imperfections. The United States too has had imperfection throughout its existence from the beginning. That in itself is no reason to blot out it's history today by taking down statutes, painting over murals and going as far as to destroy and revising the history books to portray America today. The Nazi's tried to burn all the history books and Stalinist Russia revised their history to fit their times, and China has done the same.
Democracy is simple. It is based of the belief that government is just an expression of the people it's meant to govern. It means you don't create policies that the people don't want, and if you want things to change, you have to explain the changes and get people to agree BEFORE making them.
In China, maybe the people would support the idea of taking away a man's home to build a highway, but what about to build a high rise apartment building? Shouldn't he get to at least keep one of the apartments? But the people were not asked. Democracy allows us to keep discussing the things we don't like until our representatives fix them. China? Nope. Democracy has mechanisms to hold leaders accountable. While Progressive Marxist Socialist/DSA are promoting Nazi, Communist methods to revise and blur the truth.
