Despite Fukuyama\u2019s premature pronouncement, we have decidedly not reached the end of history.\u00a0 Each new moment seems destined for the books, for study by some subsequent generation.\u00a0 It feels like existing in a holographic diorama in an ultramodern (likely virtual) museum.\u00a0 To create history, while being mindful of its future effects and at once avoiding the mistakes of the past is an almost impossible task, a neat trick, a tough ask.\u00a0 Any yet that is what we must do.<\/p>\n
This is not the first critical challenge that we have faced as a people, not the only pandemic.\u00a0 Whether located occidental or oriental, our species survived dark times and prospered by relying on the progress of science, technologies, medicines, modes of thought.\u00a0 Conversely, our times of suffering resulted from the denigration of rational inquiry, from the polarization of politics, from civil insurrection, from the fundamental clash between religion and science.<\/p>\n
Nuances exist, sure, but the central lessons of our history are obvious to those that care to examine them.\u00a0 When unified, when inspired, when the wants of the few are subsumed to the needs of the many, there is no foe, military or epidemiological, that we cannot defeat.\u00a0 When driven by fear, by greed, by lust for power, there may be the temporary appearance of victory, but the long view reveals failure and shame.<\/p>\n
In the United States, we have long had occasion to champion our triumphs, to celebrate the hegemony that we believed that we deserved.\u00a0 Now we reckon with our history in a way that we have never been forced.\u00a0 Subjugation allowed for a specific story to be told, a whitewashing of a complex narrative, a glossing over of the bloody colonization and pillaging of the American continent.\u00a0 Our sins have now risen to consume us, as they inevitably would.<\/p>\n
For an unfortunately large part of the American population, our backwards history is a source of comfort.\u00a0 These folks yearn for a time when success and safety was gained not by merit, but by ill-gotten advantage, by the color of skin or the form of reproductive organs.\u00a0 Faced with a new reality, they cling desperately to a past that is thankfully on its way out.\u00a0 Not gone, no:\u00a0 we have much work still to do.<\/p>\n
Symbols and boastful, hateful rhetoric remain as vestiges of a cruel history that we struggle to escape.\u00a0 Validation of the Confederate flag as anything other than a museum piece ignores the violence that such cloth recalls, the innate shudder of heart at seeing it fly aloft.\u00a0 We cannot leave a sanguine history for our heirs unless we explicitly reject our past transgressions and embrace equality and opportunity for all.\u00a0 Allegedly founding principles of this country, those lines from our formative documents have seemed about as honest as marketing copy.<\/p>\n
We will be judged for the decisions that we make at this seminal time.\u00a0 We have been granted a period of introspection, we are absorbing the energy of protest against tyranny, we have a calibrated compass to correct the errant course of our present.\u00a0 We have no excuses; our world has revealed itself to us and we can either internalize the vision or pretend that it is an apparition.<\/p>\n
I picture sitting as an old man, with Violet\u2019s daughter in my lap, describing to her the rawness and possibilities of this current crossroads of history.\u00a0 I would much rather explain how we gathered our senses and moved toward the light, rather than sheepishly apologize for plunging her into darkness.\u00a0 Help me prevent my future granddaughter\u2019s tears.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"