Quote:I don't think it's a liberal tenant at all that the country isn't great.  I think this is a great country.  But I also think we need to improve, and we certainly can't look past our past atrocities.

 

My wife did her master's thesis on how ignoring the worst parts of history in favor of the good ones leads to future problems.  We can't just ignore the fact that slavery was a major problem in this country.  We can't just ignore history.  And we absolutely shouldn't.  How blacks were treated during slavery, as well as the years after up until the Civil Rights Act, and even beyond that.  That's an important part of our history too.  So is FDR's Executive Order for Japanese Internment as well as his plan to pack the supreme court.  These aren't things we should ignore because America is great.  


Imagine if Germany refused to teach about the Holocaust.  Many countries have used historical revisionism in order to make themselves look better, and thus fail to learn from their mistakes.  "Those who fail to learn from History are doomed to repeat it" - George Santayana.  We shouldn't sweep our treatment of Native Americans under the rug to say "Well yeah, but we also fought off the British, so they were great people who should be revered."  The fact is they were imperfect people.  That doesn't take away from the great things they did.  We shouldn't sweep slavery under the rug, or the treatment of blacks during the years after the Civil War.  We should look at their fight for their rights.  If we don't, we could very well eventually underestimate the importance of the rights that we have today.