What A Future Without A History Looks Like

Conservatives are fast-tracking an erasure of world history because it is a shameful one- and it will allow them to turn the horrors of yesteryear into a future fate we cannot escape.

The passage of time has been been a friend to the most vile and violent of human potential. As we have drifted further and further from tragic past events, the wealthy and powerful have leveraged that space between to suppress or altogether erase the bloodstained pathway that led us here. Today, the hateful rhetoric and brutality once so indelibly embedded in our culture is making a profound comeback, mostly because history is being forgotten- tilled under the soil so those who fantasize about supremacy and freedom to hurt others can do it again.

20 years ago I received a post card from a friend, an older woman- a teach- I greatly admired. The postcard was from Gettysburg where she was attending and participating in a civil war re-enactment where it would be performed as such that the Confederacy won. It still happens quite frequently in Southern States. Recently we saw a sorority come under fire for hosting one of countless antebellum balls that take place on old plantations converted into a historical museums or tourist attractions. They put on era-specific finery and adopted southern drawls and no one would have ever known had one of the participants not headed into the Big Brother House on network television shortly after. Naturally, audiences called her out for expressing such insensitivity to those who suffered some of the worst trials history has had to offer, but her defense was ignorance- ignorance to a significant reality and a grotesque history that had unfolded Once Upon A Time beneath her very feet.

Ignorance.

That very thing has both enabled and emboldened the betrayal of history- a betrayal of millions of people who experienced an unfathomable existence and suffered a needless, barbaric ending. If we let history vanish as if it’s dire warnings are merely weathered off the stone its been written on, there is nothing to stop these atrocities from becoming cyclical.