In voicing her opposition to the recently passed healthcare reform bill, Republican Senate hopeful Sue Lowden of Nevada stated, "Before we all started having health care, in the olden days our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor, they would say I'll paint your house." She continued with, "I mean, that's the old days of what people would do to get health care with your doctors." That was her "new" policy suggestion to deal with the national health care crisis.
Yeah let's go back to the olden days, to a time when Africans in America were enslaved, when children were forced to work in unsafe conditions, and when African Americans and women were denied the right to vote. My father once told me that the good ole days weren't so good. The conservatives in the GOP tend to ignore that.
Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post calls this "false memory syndrome." This is the false memory of a utopian America where all were created equal and free to pursue their dreams of life, liberty and happiness. It is a nostalgic look at America that omits the terrible moments of our collective history and ignores the injustices that occurred to all who were in some way or another different than those in power be they Native American, Catholics, Jews, African-American, Southern and Eastern European immigrants, Hispanic immigrants or women. It's a syndrome that has spread throughout the GOP conservative movement that apparently prevents them from coming up with new policy ideas that will move our nation forward because they are constantly looking backward.
Throughout the country conservatives afflicted with this syndrome are trying to affect policy on a state level. In Virginia, Gov. McDonnell wanted to celebrate the confederacy while ignoring slavery, which for some was the primary force behind the Civil War. In Arizona, they want to eliminate ethnic studies classes which they say promotes "ethnic chauvinism." Never mind that we are a multi-ethnic nation. But in Texas they are going a bit farther.
There, the social conservatives not only want to omit the unsavory moments but they want to rewrite our history so that American history books can be more patriotic. They want changes that "promote patriotism." For example, one of the changes they would like to make is to diminish the importance of Thomas Jefferson because he believed in the separation of church and state. That's not promoting patriotism. That's promoting a religious agenda. What these social conservatives in Texas are doing is called revisionist history.
For decades in the Soviet Union, Stalin was portrayed as a hero. The soviet textbooks had deliberately omitted historical events such as his deal with the Nazis to takeover Poland and his brutal crackdown and murder of ethnic minorities and political opponents. In Japan, their atrocities during World War II were never mentioned in their history books.
Is this the direction we should go? Are the patriotic conservatives in Texas so ashamed of our history that they are willing to rewrite it to fulfill some social/religious agenda? Should we shun our own history because it's not ideal?
