Bearing False Witness to History

The ony currently valid way to display a Confederate Flag.  On a doofus.

Students, teachers, parents and other concerned community members turned out to protest what I'd call a value-subtracted, controversy-redacted version of American History. They want to be engaged, not indoctrinated. They want to learn, not be dictated to. They want to think, not have their lesson plans so curated that they have only so much to think about.

There's a problem with conservatism and history and the study thereof. Here's an example:

A member of Colorado's state Board of Education argued that the fact that the United States voluntarily ended slavery proved "American execptionalism" and this perspective should be taught to students in a recent Facebook post about the AP U.S. History curriculum. 

Businesswoman Pam Mazanec, who was elected to represent Colorado's 4th Congressional district on the board, jumped into a discussion about the AP History course framework Saturday on a Facebook page that describes itself as "a place where teachers and parents are encouraged to speak freely about their issues, questions, and concerns in the Douglas County School District." The Colorado Independent flagged her comment on Thursday.

Holy shit. Shades of Rep. Michele Bachmann and her dumbass claim that the Founding Fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery--but maybe slavery wasn't such a bad thing anyway. That isn't even a little bit true. Many of our Founding Fathers were slave-holders and remained so until the day they died. They didn't lift hardly a finger on behalf of the enslaved. The idea that the Founding Fathers set a bargain with the slave-holding states that was on the verge of being broken by abolitionists, especially with the election of presumed slave-grabber Lincoln, was the straw the broke the back of our comity during the Civil war.  The South Carolina Declaration of Seccession uses some pretty 'states' rights' words, but let's get to the quick of the issue:

The ends for which the Constitution was framed are declared by itself to be "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." 

These ends it endeavored to accomplish by a Federal Government, in which each State was recognized as an equal, and had separate control over its own institutions. The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor. 

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection. 

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

The "more perfect union" of the seccessionists was one where the property rights to own other human beings was accepted. They were pissed that the President might not think they had a right to own human beings and use their labor for profit, because using other human beings for profit might have been seen as wrong by that frigging guy. The Civil War resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths of American people, all because the Seccessionists still very much wanted to hold other human beings in bondage. It is a fact. It is unpleasant, but factual things can be unpleasant. If a person has cancer, it is unpleasant, but the sheer unpleasantness of it doesn't make it less true.

So when a cheapjack intellectual coward like Ben Carson who might even know better says some bullshit like learning history acording to the AP standards might make someone join ISIS?

I could be sick over the implications. I learned real history in AP History class and did not become anti-American. Charades isn't history. Beating around the bush doesn't teach people anything. We are living in the world fashioned by our history--the postive and the negative. We learn it, and we forget it at a greivous cost, Forgetting about slavery is like forgetting why the Civil War, which is like ignoring why Reconstruction, which is like forgiving Jim Crow and letting the Tenth Amendment overrule the Thirteenth. Aaaannd the Fourteenth.

We don't need a Potemkin "more perfect union" in our past. We should be continuously working for a more perfect union so that the arc of history continues to bend towards justice in our future. Not letting students of history see how we got here is so unfair. Because we are now living in the world that real history made.