They say, “Love is blind,” and there is a lot of truth in that statement whether applied to romantic love or to the love of country. I love America. You love America. I am a patriot. You are a patriot. Let’s begin with that premise.
Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and the same can be said of history. Unexamined history is not worth living. In our love of America our history has often been blindsided. We have been unwilling to examine the truth of our struggle to become what our forefathers envisioned. Winston Churchill said, “A nation that forgets its past has no future.” I’m convinced Churchill was right about that. But what is our past (our history)? Have we seen it clearly, or have we, in our love-blindness, embellished it and romanticized it out of its reality?
“History is written by the victors,” is a phrase also attributed to Churchill (as well as to Herman Goring at the Nuremberg trials). I believe that statement is true also. Our history is written by the victors.
Who were the victors in the “Trail of Tears?” You know about that, right? It’s our history and we have no future if we forget it. In the 1830’s, nearly 125,000 Native Americans lived on millions of acres of land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and North Carolina. White settlers wanted that land to grow cotton. The federal government forced these Native Americans to leave their homeland and walk 5,043 miles to what was called “Indian Territory” (Oklahoma). Thousands died along the way, some “bound in chains” and as one Choctaw leader told an Alabama newspaper at the time, it was “a trail of tears and death.” We remember the “Bataan Death March” of World War II, but we often “forget” the death march called “The Trail of Tears.” If we forget our past, as Churchill says, we will have no future.
Our past treatment of Native Americans (and our present treatment of Native Americans) is an ugly story. But it is our history. We remember genocide in other lands, but we ignore the genocide that took place in our own.
We talk about the concentration camps in Germany and elsewhere, but we tend to forget the various concentration camps that are part of our own history—“reservations” for Native Americans and “internment camps” for Japanese Americans in WW II. And then, of course, there is the issue of slavery and a bloody civil war, and the demeaning of immigrants from Italy, Ireland, etc. in the late 19 century.
Our American history is not a pleasant or pretty story as we pretend it to be. To forget it, or ignore it, and for some, even to deny it, means that we will have no future. Love is blind. Love of country is blind, too. Such blindness prevents us from seeing reality—our reality—“a trail of tears.” It prevents us from moving forward toward the real American dream.
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“Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes,
our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions,
they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
(John Adams)
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