History

I love history. It was my favorite subject in High School and I took more history classes than I was required to take. Part of my love stemmed from the ease of it. I have a pretty good memory so memorizing some dates and facts for a test was fairly easy. Then there is the part where I viewed history as fact. This is stuff that happened so there's no hedging about what to do about it. It's in the past and that's that right? Well, not so much apparently.

What I didn't take into consideration back then was the interpretation of history, which is all circumstantial. Depending on your viewpoint, you interpret history differently, especially if you leave certain parts of history out. For instance, you can think that the Civil War was about State's rights and that Lincoln only issued the Emancipation Proclamation to boost the war effort of the North and give the troops morale, which is how I learned the Civil War. You can think that until you read the Confederate's Constitution which makes it clear that it was about slavery.

When people make up their own version of history, which usually means ignoring parts of the picture, it ends up being wrong. When I finally learned the whole truth, things started being clearer. My understanding of how our nation functions is much better because it is not our history that makes us, rather, it is what we do with our history that creates who we are. Anyone can sit around and be bitter about the things that have happened to us as a nation or individually. It takes true character and strength to get up, and learn from it. To blame our circumstances on the past is to neglect our future. If we are always looking behind us, we will miss the opportunities and blessings of right now, and the future. Never forget the past so that we will recognize and be guarded from recurrences, but look ahead to our future and start protecting that.