Should we reconstruct history to deceptively purify who we were, or should we embrace the past to constructively advance who we can be?
Perhaps it may be wise to view the term "History" as the compound word product of the phrase "His Story;" the story of God and its people.
Does not that hybrid word suggest an unfiltered digest of man's sins and good works?
It seems to me that non-purified history does not magnify righteousness, nor does it erase evil. Therefore, should it not serve as a foundational reminder of our historic strengths and weaknesses; transgressions and virtues, to be faithfully referred to in pursuit of "a more perfect" existence?
Furthermore, should not such a consideration of history serve to advance without division, judgement, and humiliation, the lifting of the overall human condition?
Does it not appear that the problem with "sanitized" history is that it may hold from the student a true understanding of what actually occurred, such as the fact that President Lincoln previously pronounced a collective national guilt for slavery, and identified the Civil War as the just application of God's wrath upon the entire nation, North and South, for that transgression?
Did not Lincoln also suggest that the process of redemption would necessarily be an ongoing project?...
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations
After 155 years of needed institutional remediation, is it not now time to turn away from the meaningless superficial world of publicly expressed collective guilt, and to hold for atonement, those bearing personal responsibility?
It often occurs to me that 100 years from now, will the Americans of America's third century, identify any of our current legally-sanctioned practices, worthy of an apology by those applicants, who hold by virtue of protected "choice," a privilege over other helpless human beings?
Just musing.