The Problem with History

I’ve always been an advocate of history. It’s something that we should remember and learn from in every way. That old adage states it best: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

On the other hand, the problem with history is that we tend to take what happened in the past and relive it in the present.

What prompted this post is an excerpt I heard on a local radio show here in Dallas. On this show, the question was asked, ‘What is America’s true pastime?'

This question seemed straight forward, coinciding with opening day of America’s self proclaimed pastime, baseball. What made it interesting this time was what a particular caller brought up as his answer.

When asked the question above, the caller replied, ‘Baseball and lynching.'

What?!? Did I hear that right? Lynching?

When the host asked why lynching was even brought up, it was obvious that the man had a completely different agenda than answering the simple question of America’s true pastime. The caller promptly answered by saying lynching was America’s pastime before baseball because every white man owned a slave. Before baseball, a white man had nothing else to hit.

Are you kidding me? Was this really brought up on a sports program?

After hearing his answer and his explanation, it was clear to me that this man was truly deranged. To put this picture even more into focus, yes this man was African-American, and yes, he has every right to be upset at the atrocities of our past. But, to blindly bring this up on a format such as a sports show conveys a message of hate that does no good in a society that has truly embraced the idea of inclusion.

I would hope that a majority of the listeners that day realized how absurd those comments really were, but to put them in a greater context, this hate in relation to remembrance of history is playing out today all over the world. It’s playing out in the Balkans. It’s playing out in the impoverished tribal regions of Darfur and greater Africa. And on the forefront of everyone’s mind, it’s playing out and has been playing out in the Middle East for thousands of years all because the three branches of religion that derive from Abraham himself can’t seen to get along.

The only fix for any of this is time, an open mind and the realization that the past belongs in the past. All that history asks of us is that we remember and not to use it as a tool of one’s agenda.

In other words, what’s done is done and just move on.