Quote:
Originally Posted by abaya
Wish I had more time to get into this (or maybe not, heh), but I just wanted to add that when I taught US History to 11th graders and actually DID use bits from Zinn and others, emphasizing as much of the "true history" as I was aware of, myself... I was accused of being (at various times) a communist, a socialist, a democrat (haha), and someone who hated the US. Straight from the parents' mouth, to be sure.
I'll never forget when one 17 year old girl looked up at me, frowning, after I taught about the shit that went down during the whole Panama Canal acquisition/construction, and said, "You're making me feel like America did a lot of bad stuff."
Now, you cry ME a fucking river.
This was in spring 2003... not that they gave a shit about the Iraq war starting, either.
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Generation have been spoon fed a sanitized version of US history. I find it odd how upset people get when they hear anything even remotely negative regarding our past.
Well guess what? We really did hand out disease ridden blanket to the indigenous population. But we only did that when it turned out shooting them was costing us too many lives. We really did lock up all the American citizens who happened to have Japanese genes. Probably all of the signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. We've started/supported wars in 3rd world countries just to get a better deal on banana's (might be some sugar cane and tobacco in there too.)
People want the "we are the great, always have been, never did anything wrong" BS. Why? I have no idea. I do know recently I watched a show on George Washington's family farm and after a lot of digging and searching they concluded there never was any fucking cherry tree. Well that's not what my 8th grade US history book told me.
The list of crap we've done wrong is probably equally long as the list of shit we did right. I'd hope we could learn from our mistakes, if we keep denying them i hold out little hope.