I think my big mistake has been letting the nonsense of the outside world filter in. This morning, I was reading about one of the red states which has decided that we don’t need to teach anything to our students other than”America, Fuck Yeah!” Not that this should come as any surprise. I’ve been told by people who were alive at the time that the internment of the Japanese Americans during World War II “was for their own good.” Wow. Again, a truly telling sentiment. Instead of trying to strive for exceptionalism in the face of our baser desires, we cling on to the notion that the history written by the victors is the only story worth knowing. The irony, of course, is that the same people who derided communist nations and dictatorial regimes for controlling the only information which might reach their citizens are now trying to control and limit the information which reaches the ears of their own constituents. I don’t know, maybe if we outlaw knowledge, kids will finally seek it out because it is taboo. Hell, let’s declare a War on Education, and drive up test scores by secret cabals of students huddled around contraband textbooks from the coasts.

Yes, I know, my rant is suffering from a painfully liberal bias. It’s just that sometimes I get overwhelmingly frustrated with otherwise intelligent people doing abhorrent things. Take the issue of gay marriage. There is opinion that a religious union is the only definition of marriage, and therefore cannot be applied to homosexuals. But, as a consolation prize, the gays could totally have civil unions. I then asked if, by this definition, my wife and I were married. I was told, of course. I then pointed out that, not only were we married in a civil ceremony, but I am an atheist. How is it right that the religious protection of marriage is okay with someone who wants to get rid of religion to make the world a better place, but won’t consider two Christians who happen to possess similar genitalia? It’s easy to deny a right to someone if you don’t consider them a real person, and have never had that right denied to yourself. But I’ve gotten just a little bit off topic.

There are those who believe that to admit that this country has condoned such shameful acts is to somehow lessen the value of the American spirit. This is and has always been, at its best, a country of ideals. In reality we, as citizens of this nation, have failed at least as often as we have succeeded, but what made this country great was our forefathers standing right back up again and forcing themselves to do it better. This country was born on the backs of genocide and slavery, and that is a lot to overcome. And it’s no good to mention that slavery was the status quo among the colonizing nations of the day, or mention that the Spanish took their genocide to a multicontinental level. We are not going to find redemption in the fact that other people were simply worse. Like a home that’s rapidly approaching spring cleaning, the task of knowing where to start is often overwhelming, but to do nothing will accomplish just the same. We cannot fix, nor rewrite the past, but we can learn from it, and do our best to make sure that it can never happen again.

Let’s go back to the example I mentioned earlier: The internment of the Japanese Americans during World War II. Despite their innocence, it probably was safer for them to be anywhere else. But locking up a group of people just because you cannot control your other citizens’ idiocy and mob mentality is not what you should be focusing on. There is a certain shame in locking up a group of people just because you think it’s necessary to hate the country of their origin. What can we do to make it up to those who suffered this indignity? Absolutely nothing, other than to ensure that it never again may come to pass, and not sweep this chapter under the rug of patriotism.

When the Native Americans were rounded up, killed off, deposited upon land we decided that we didn’t need, and then moved again when we changed our minds, stripped of their languages and cultures, that was okay, because of manifest destiny. This continent was ours, and, by God, we were going to tame it. And whom did we decide to use to do the taming? Another group of people we felt must be inferior because they weren’t European. Religion was also used in the justification of slavery, as some ideas are apparently too good to need to change over the course of millennia. We took those people from their lands and brought them here as property. We destroyed families and cultures and destabilized a continent on our way to do the same to another one. There is no way that we can undo the sins the men and women of our nation committed in the name of whatever they used to justify their actions. My guess is the Holy Sound of the British Pound (and later, the Almighty Dollar).

So what can we do to make it right? What can we do try and put right what once went wrong (I called Scott Bakula, but it turns out he’s busy)? Let’s start by trying to figure out how to level the playing field so that it’s not any harder to get ahead in life just based upon the color of your skin or the construction of your reproductive organs. We could have the most prosperous land in all the world, if only we could learn to lift up one another. And why stop at this country, when we are but a small part of a global species? I know that it’s easier to do what you must just to get by, but maybe if we could all get together and put our head together, we could use the genius of our species and figure out how to change the rules of life and steer it away from being a zero sum game. But the only way to do that is to set aside our seeming desire for the comfort of ignorance and face the hard truths that none of us is perfect. And the only way to do that is to open up our avenues for education, not shut down everything that makes us question everything, and ourselves as well.

-Tex