http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/26/1439414/-The-unreality-of-America-and-the-importance-of-facing-facts?detail=email
Facing facts is not something we're very good at in America. In fact our entire society is based on the opposite principle, avoiding the truth in favor of an appealing fortress of contrived fantasy: Disneyland America, Leave it to Beaver America, the America on television, the one where everyone lives comfortable, privileged lives and no one is poor, homeless or insane. And no one ever goes to jail, loses their house, falls ill and goes bankrupt, goes to war or comes home in a body bag.
Former First Lady Barbara Bush said of the war in Iraq: "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"
We, as a culture, are in such denial that it is both astonishing and alarming. History can be thought of as having two meanings, that which actually happened and the stories we tell ourselves about what happened. Those stories are often in stark contrast, and often intentionally so, to what actually took place. History is told by the victors to make themselves feel and look better. Our history is hopelessly bound up in our propaganda and mythology.
Columbus heroically 'discovered' America, rather than blundering into it and then savaging the natives.
We are the land of the free and the home of the brave. We opened the continent to European 'discovery.' We tamed the West. It was manifest destiny. And the slaves upon whose backs the nation was built were basically immigrant workers.
This is a graphic from an actual history textbook in the Texas public school system. Our standards have fallen shockingly low (with a little help from our billionaires).
Our brightest minds have warned us, but who listens to those guys? What's the point in listening to the smart people, right?
“The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
We do not, in most cases, teach our children the unabridged truth about our actual history, only a sanitized and distorted version of it designed to make them feel good about who we are as a people. We don't dwell on the negatives or the controversial aspects of our history. We blithely skip over the true depth and horror of centuries of slavery. The impression often created, and there are always exceptions, is that slavery was a blip in our national time line, an unfortunate aberration where for some time some Americans were not so great. The depth, the nearly three-hundred-year duration, the ungodly inhumanity of it or the outrageous persistence of it is usually softened, often to the point of denial.
