~a column by colleen O’Brien
When we were learning history in high school, I was either asleep or taught a scrubbed version. Except for Miss Price, who had us all researching the Holocaust in Hitler’s Germany, I was not exposed to the evils that men do. We learned nothing of white Europeans wiping out the natives in the New World; not much about the true conditions of the enslavement of Africans; nothing at all about females as second class citizens unable to own property, divorce and take their children with them; we skipped anything about laborers trying to get paid a living wage by the big boss or passing laws to protect their children from having to work at all.
When I got to college and learned from pioneer diaries what it was really like crossing Iowa in a covered wagon, I dropped all romantic notions of little houses on prairies. The more I read history, the less I liked us.
Possibly I heard of the monsters — Atilla the Hun, Ivan the Terrible, Stalin — but in a way that made them the exceptions to decent behavior. Eventually I learned that the good guys, too, fell apart in the trenches of day to day living: Thomas Jefferson kept slaves although he didn’t believe in slavery; Andrew Jackson wanted to get rid of all the Indians in the southeast U.S., either by walking them to death or just generally coercing them because they were after all just savages; Oliver Wendell Holmes as a Supreme Court judge wrote the decision that sterilizing criminals, the feeble minded and the promiscuous was not against due process of law.
We humans do go on a lot about how brilliant we are to have designed pyramids and aqueducts and medicine and music and trips to the moon; but we don’t talk much about the dark side of us all. That we can accept and excuse horrible behavior, even take part in it — each of us — is glossed over in the history books as well as in our own minds.
If we could do better I like to think that we would, or even that we are doing better each century. Even with the recent book (The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker) telling us we are less violent, less cruel, more peaceful than we were 500 years ago, there’s too much inhumanity to humanity in front of my face to believe it.
So . . . I don’t know if it’s the constant news of the world and its woes and wars or if it’s the endlessness of sexist jokes, ill will, a second-grade vocabulary and bullying as a first reaction from the guy who is the poster boy for these behaviors and who wants to be our president.
Maybe we deserve him.
