The Past will Never Improve
Mon, June 15, 2020 If there is one life lesson, I have learned over the years it is that no matter how hard I try, my past will never get any better. All one can do is deal with it and move on. I was physically beaten as a child, both by my father and the British School System. Except it was not seen as abuse back in the 1940s, it was viewed as discipline.
History too will not improve, bad things happened, we cannot change that. However, we can learn from it and move on. Today at 84 years old, I can remember almost 80 years of living history. Much of it I did not understand at the time, other events I still don’t understand to this day.
The first black men I ever saw were the African American soldiers who came over to England in 1944 along with the rest of the American army. They came in readiness for the Normandy Invasion. The black soldiers had their own separate segregated camp. I was told by other kids at school, “The white soldiers don’t like the black soldiers.” I never understood why? “Aren’t they all on the same side?” I asked.
Later in the mid-1950s and early 1960s while in my teens and early 20s still in England I watched the Newsreel at my local movie theater. I saw white police in the Southern States beating black people with clubs, attacking with police dogs, and high-pressure water cannons. Again, I asked why? What is their problem?
Here we are 60 years later, and we are still seeing the same police brutality, not just in the US, but the world over. When a police officer kills someone, it is often found that this same officer has had numerous complaints filed against him and nothing was done.
When a District Attorney is found to have convicted several innocent people, why are they not held accountable? Why is there not an inquiry? If it were a CEO of a large corporation who was showing this level of incompetence, there would certainly be an enquiry.
In any country, even in the so-called Free World, we are only as free as the police allow us to be. People are protesting police brutality all over the world; a very real and pressing issue. However, people are getting side-tracked, and trying to erase history.
I ask myself, what is the point of going back, sometimes hundreds of years and accusing people of racism and white supremacy, when they are long dead, and it wasn’t even known by those terms back then, any more than my being beaten with a stick was seen as child abuse. There are plenty of pressing current issues.
Here is a piece of history we can learn from; peaceful demonstrations by large numbers of people are far more effective than violent and destructive one’s. Martin Luther King proved that. So too are large numbers of people making their voice heard at the ballot box. Going violently against police in full riot gear is an exercise in futility, like poking a bear with a stick.
We cannot erase history and forget it happened, and if we do not learn from it, it is bound to repeat. Sadly, every time it does, the price goes up.
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Reader Comments (10)
I view the killing of Martin Luther King as the probable most destructive thing that happened to racial equality in the recent history of the United States.
Well said, Dave.
Great post!
Please do remember history, Dave. It goes even farther back, to the 1860s, when civil war put an end to slavery where peaceful protest could not.
80 years later their descendants, including my grandfather, were among the many black GIs in England. They returned to a segregated America. It would be decades before desegregation and the Voting Rights act would pass. "Making their voices heard at the ballot box" was dependent on someone allowing them to do so.
The next generation, including my father, has peacefully protested the disproportionate use of police violence against black people for decades. If nothing has changed, what have we really learned?
History is repeating, but if you are looking at the wrong facet you are right that the price keeps going up.
Champs,
I have read accounts of Black GIs returning from Europe to find German POWs eating in restaurants that they were not allowed to enter.
As a child during WWII there was a little girl in my class named Susan. Years later in my mid 30s (The 1960s.) I was laying in bed one night, thinking of the kids in my school. I was suddenly awake and sat up in bed and said out loud, "My God, Susan was Black." I never saw her as different as a child. She was light skin, her mother was white, but her hair and features as I remembered. Her father who I never saw, was obviously black.
Years later I wrote a song called "The Devil in the distance." Part of it goes,
I never understood racism and I still don't. There are many legitimate reasons to like or dislike someone, but a different color skin is not one of them.
Dave
I'm not sure what you are getting at when you talk about "erasing history". Pulling down statues of Confederates who took arms against our government is not erasing history, it is simply adds to the history, which is ongoing. I only wish I could have been there to help pull them down.
Thanks Dave for an excellent and timely post,
There is probably an evolutionary basis for prejudice.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evolution-of-prejudice
A child may not be born prejudice; however, within a few months the child can tell the difference between ingroup and outgroup. As we become more diverse, this may change. Until then, society will need to continue to teach/enforce diversity. Regarding confederate statutes, I find it most disturbing why the statues were placed there in the first place; or why the confederate flag had a place next to the American flag. Mike
Jim Townsend,
I am sorry if I misled you but believe me, I was extremely careful NOT to mention statue removal for fear I would be misunderstood. My point was simply that blaming history does nothing to improve the current injustices people still suffer, especially minorities. Police brutality all over the world, and the exploitation of mainly of black and brown people in the Diamond, Cocoa, Coffee and Sugar trade for example. The people who run these industries are the one's who should be stepping up right now to rectify the matter, and are the one's people should be holding responsible, not people who have been dead a hundred years or more and therefore can do nothing.
Dave.
Pulling down statues is part of "cancel culture" which leads in the extreme to the Chinese Cultural Revolution for instance.
Those who don't have a future, try to change the past.
I don't think we are here to change history. Time is linear, it doesn't go backwards. For us to do so is a sad waste of our most precious resource, Time. Too bad time is free, makes spending it easy.
The problem is, none of us know how much time we have to spend. But that makes the harder work, of living a good life, of loving life, of taking it by the horns and making something of ourselves, that much more satisfying.
And we have no time for doubt, we develop more sense than that.