I understand that there are parts of our history that are uncomfortable. Slavery. The treatment of Native Americans. Our participation in wars. Japanese encampments. I could make a long long list if I really tried. But, just like the history of our nation is not perfect, neither are any of us. I could make an equally long long list of my various imperfections. Pretty sure anyone reading this could do the same.

As I was considering this recent movement to get rid of Confederate monuments, remove Indian names from school buildings, and all of the other “politically correct” BS that keeps being force-fed to us, I can’t help but wonder….what things are we doing today that our grandchildren and their descendants would be aghast about?

My friend and I were talking this weekend about our dads who were heavy heavy smokers, and who smoked all around us as kids. Our children, the grandchildren of these men, have grown up with the knowledge of the health hazards of tobacco smoke. I hearken back to the countless trips in the car, sans seat belt…or worse, flying 60 miles an hour down a dusty ditch bank in the back of my dad’s truck…or the story of the “playpen” that I rode around the car in as a baby – the playpen strapped in, me loose in the middle of the damn thing. Our kids? They have been harnessed into our vehicles since day one and will never know any different.

So I ask you this, should we disavow our parents for such transgressions? For gods sake! How many died? What kind of toxins were we exposed to?

Jesus, I never wore a bicycle helmet and neither did any of my friends. Pretty sure our parents should be locked up. We should ban them from our lives now and forever! How dare they be cold-hearted and expose us to such harm!

Sounds ridiculous, right? After all…they didn’t know any better about the seat belts or the cigarettes or the bicycle helmets. You see…they learned. And what did they do with that learning? They taught us to do it differently, to not do it like they did.

Or, we learned and passed along a different kind of life to our children in the face of that new knowledge.

So what the hell are we doing to our children, now?

If we are going to tear down the Confederate statues, then someone needs to come here and burn down the Grant House here in my hometown. After all, General Ulysses S. Grant was a Union soldier. And do you know what one of the things the Union soldiers did? They poisoned wells. Water that was life giving to people, plants, and animals. Ostensibly to poison Confederate soldiers…but guess what….that poison killed children, too. Like the Lotz children in Franklin, Tennessee.

Pretty sure you didn’t know about that, right? So if Ulysses S. Grant sanctioned that kind of activity, why aren’t we burning down his house here in Vancouver WA?

If we are going to erase all of the “bad stuff” in our Nation’s history, then how in the hell are our children going to learn from it? How are they going to know how to do better?

We are already raising a scary generation of children who have been told they are perfect, so we should make sure they live in a perfect Nation as well, right?

Wrong.

We can do better. We must do better.

 

The Grant House, Vancouver Washington