I was reading through chapters 10-19 of Genesis today "on my back porch" and it got me to thinking about how I would write my own history. Many people deny the validity of the Bible by saying it is a book about a family and filled with cute stories and makes you think good thouhgts and do good deeds. However, on closer examination of this "family" history I want to say if it were NOT true I wouldn't have included these things in my book. In just the ten chapters I read today Abram lied to Egyptian king about Sarai being his sister so he received many gifts in exchange for her (a cute little story about how he became wealthy which would be shared amongst the children and grandchildren "right"). Sarai (Abram's wife NOT sister) allowed Abram to sleep with her slave, Hagar, to produce a son and later mistreat the slave and force her to flee. Then there was Lot who not only offered the angry mob at his door the opportunity to have their way with his daughters instead of the men they wanted to molest, there were his daughters who later in the story got their father drunk and slept with him in order to produce offspring. These are not stories I would make up about my family and include them in an anthology for generations to read, unless they were true. Even if it were true many people would hide the facts and relics of their ancestory to paint a rosy picture about the past. This is what I am afraid that today's society might do without meaning to.
In the recent debate over the Confederate Battle Flag I want to go on record and say that it does not need to be on the capital grounds of any state, local, and/or county government. However, I must say that to totally blot out the mere mention or image of the flag is doing a disservice to the people. What South Carolina did was right (even though they probably shouldn't have flown it anyway, my opinion) they took it down and put it in a museum. They didn't burn it or deny the fact it ever existed, they allowed a place to display the flag and teach future generations what that flag represented. Not just slave owning aristocracy but a troubled time in our nation's history. Imagine if there were no reminders of that terrible time where brother rebelled against brother and the nation was torn apart "partly" because of the institution of slavery. Notice I said partly... Could the people begin to believe that the causes of that terrible time never could happen and begin to deny that they ever did.
Why do you think that the survivors of the Holocaust lecture school age children and keep the reminders of that terrible time (their tatoos from the concentration camps) even though they could have erased them from their eyesight (yes you can have a tatoo removed). They never want you to forget what that terrible man (Hitler) and his followers (NAZIs) did. If you don't believe that people could forget you may not be aware of the Holocaust deniers that spread their false teachings all around and have gotten a real boost from the Internet (you can reach a lot of people on the Internet).
I am not proposing that everyone should fly the Stars and Bars proudly or anything of that sort. I am also not saying that we should cancel TV shows or any other knee-jerk reaction to make us feel all warm and fuzzy. All I am saying is that the world needs reminders of the history of this great nation and if we ban one symbol of that war we may have to ban another the Stars and Stripes which has a lot of things associated with it that let us say are not "kosher". One co-worker of mine put it right and said even though we fly it proud the flag has a lot of band-aids to cover up the blemishes and cuts and scrapes of the past.
History is not always pretty but let us learn from the remnants of our past and remember "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it!"
