The is a problem with foisting the truth of history and replacing it with a knockoff.  Truth is like a snowball in the child’s hot hands who takes the snowball into the warm house to show Mom.  It melts, disappears and returns a year later as it was, reassembled in the first snow. Whatever the current leadership thinks will be accomplished by raiding the museums of the US to create a knockoff reality for America will not succeed. I am pretty sure George Orwell in writing 1984 was only trying to generate resistance to the worst of the abuses of battered truth and had no idea his book would become the strategic model for a powerful nation.

The sheer arrogance of thinking that the truth can become the subordinate servant of political process will bring this country, great or not, to its knees.  History is a discipline millennia years old.  History was not written by the Democrats, Republicans, Baptists, Catholics, Buddhists, the woke, the asleep, or any religious or political tradition.  History was written by generations of historians painstakingly reviewing the evidence of events.  All one needs to do is read a few history books written before the age of electronic media created concierge history.  We still have today disciplined historians, but their books are rarely read by voters or the people who govern. Yes, anything written by a human being will show some evidence of bias.  But any history in its legitimacy is reviewed by people who make it a point of honor to avoid the misuse of bias.  Truth is tired of being casually and strategically dissembled.  The penalty for the abuse of truth is severe no matter who perpetrates the crime, but the enforcer of the penalty is not usually humankind.  Rather Truth reasserts herself assuring the abuser’s reputation becomes infamy.   Whatever is stolen from the museums today will be next year’s dark, cold snow for the nation. 

A Modest Proposal for Good

In past posts, this Project has talked about using or losing facts to abuse the context of truth. Using Museums as erasures of the darker sides of American history’s context is a lie, but far more importantly an abuse of truth. The abuse of truth cuts deeper than the playground lie.  We need to reconcile ourselves to the context of American history and use that knowledge to pursue the virtues of the future for which this country was once known; honesty, integrity, and growing maturity.  Good is knowing onself at the the level of truth which for both nations and individuals. Good will always contain both the dark events and the light breaking through. What this Administration wants to do is draw a red, white, and blue picture of our history with a gray crayon. Fascism’s art has always been oddly color deprived and tone deaf.  We have been and could be a proud nation again.  But pride is written in the lower case in a genuinely good nation because honesty and integrity call for the dark and the light.  Anything else is a lie and an abuse of truth or as one of our spiritual traditions calls it: the sin of “bearing false witness.”