Re-writing History to Better Suit Your Needs

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/16/texas-schools-rewrites-us-history

Check out the above link to see how people are trying to re-write history!

Upon reading this, my first thought was: Why are we trying to re-write history? They want to include "lessons promoting God and guns"? Take out Thomas Jefferson? Justify the anti-witch hunt that happened in the 50s by Senator Joseph McCarthy? What? You mean historians weren't brought in to validate some of these things before deciding to put them in the curriculum? Nooooooo! Get outta here! Religion and virtue contributed to the growth of the American Colonies? Wow! And this whole time, I thought that the growth of the American Colonies was achieved because of slavery and stealing land from the Native Americans...doesn't sound too religious and virtuous to me! The income tax should be abolished because it contradicts the Bible? "One curriculum amendment describes the civil rights movement as creating 'unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes' among minorities." Since when did equality become an unrealistic expectation?! George Wallace (former 60s governor of Alabama) and MLK were standing up for the same things? What?

How dumb do you think people are? Didn't they suffer religious persecution in England? And isn't that why they came across the "pond"? To escape religious persecution and to practice their beliefs? So why are we trying to do the same thing? I'm a Christian, but I do believe that people should not have God forced on them. They want to teach how the Ten Commandments influenced our laws and the Constitution, but you want to omit the father of the Constitution?

What kind of crap is this? This isn't an education! This is a brainwashing. America was not founded on Christian principles or on the Ten Commandments...I clearly recall some stealing and killing being involved in "securing" America for England...I clearly recall some adultery being involved between the masters raping their female slaves...I clearly recall cruelty being involved...where does this fit in with America obeying the Commandments? Oh! That's right, America was founded on these principles, America just didn't bother to follow them. So we're now going to try to teach kids to say one thing and do another...because that's how we should bring up our future leaders!

If you rewrite history, you cannot learn from the past mistakes. If you try to take out the "uncomfortable" bits of history then who are you protecting? I'll tell you, you're protecting your own guilty conscience. You're not protecting the students. History is about facts, not about figments of the imagination. For these people to try to write a history curriculum and not collaborate with historians is absolutely bogus. If they can do that, then I should be able to re-write science and math. I think I'll say that 2+2=22. Or that we all come from eggs (we were hatched!) Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?

What irritates me the most is that they are trying to re-write how minorities were unfairly treated in the past. THIS COUNTRY WAS BUILT ON THE BACKS AND AT THE EXPENSE OF MINORITIES!!! YOU CAN'T TRY TO RE-WRITE OUR CONTRIBUTIONS!!! YOU CAN'T TRY TO SAY THAT AMERICA WAS ONE BIG HIPPIE FREE LOVING COUNTRY RIGHT FROM ITS INCEPTION! IT WASN'T AND NO AMOUNT OF WISHING WILL CHANGE THAT. Part of the great thing about history is that you're supposed to learn from it, so that you will not repeat those mistakes, re-writing the mistakes and the bad is not learning from it.

As an African American, the very fact that people are trying to re-write our history is upsetting. First of all white ancestors stole our ancestors from Africa and effectively wiped us away from our culture and our history and made us slaves...now you're trying to wipe away another part of the history that your ancestors forced on us. African Americans are trying to establish our history and you're trying to take it away.

Let me ask you this question: do people honestly think that by trying to re-write history that the truth will not eventually come out? Will it make people feel better to break one of the Commandments that they are trying to make the school acknowledge-lying. At the end of the day if you re-write history to suit your own specific purposes you are doing nothing but lying. And as any Christian knows, a lie is a lie..no matter how, white, blue, big or small it is...at the end of the day it's a lie. AN exaggeration is a lie, omitting things is a lie of omission. People let's stop the lies...let's tell history the way it happened...not the Disneyland version of Kumbaya and good will to all.