How to Think

        The other day I started reading a book I have had on my to-read list for years: A People's  History of the United States by Howard Zinn. It feels a little weird to be plugging a book that has been around for nearly half a century, but I can't recommend this work highly enough. Unlike most history textbooks, Zinn's book considers the history of our country from the underside. He doesn't spend much time on the "heroes" and battles that dominate many other tellings of our history; instead he considers how those heroes’ policies affected the people, especially the "underclass" of slaves, laborers, immigrants, and Native Americans who have done most of the "working and paying and living and dying” in this country, to quote George Bailey's impassioned speech in It’s a Wonderful Life.

        A theme that comes through with undeniable clarity is the nearly unstoppable power of greed combined with wealth. Take the well-funded Christopher Columbus enslaving and eventually eliminating the Arawak people in a thirst for gold and treasure. Take the Andrew Jackson administration’s repeated breaking of promises and treaties for the purpose of removing native Americans from lands that white speculators and settlers wanted. Take white people’s shameful four-hundred-year history of enslaving, oppressing, and impoverishing our black brothers and sisters and our utter refusal even to entertain the notion of reparations for our crimes. Take all this and more, and then try to tell me there isn’t some sinister system behind it all, keeping the wheels greased and the gears running smoothly to ensure that power and wealth stay in the hands of the powerful and wealthy. I call this nefarious force the Domination System.

        The Domination System operates on a few simple but ironclad rules: the only legitimate form of power is power-over; the strong make the rules, and if the weak protest they are put in their place or eliminated; you can never be wealthy enough or powerful enough; and everybody operates by the same rules, so it's in your interest to have a lot of guns to protect your stuff. These principles apply in individual cases, and they apply to entire nation-states.

        A corollary to these rules is the truism that the winners write the history. That's why Zinn's book has been banned on a number of occasions, and it's why certain politicians are intent on whitewashing (pun intended) the history that is taught to our children. Anything that paints the United States or the white people who have been the nation's power-brokers from the beginning in a negative light has to be excised, suppressed, censored. We don't want our precious children to feel ashamed of their country or their racial heritage. Even when there is plenty there to be ashamed (and repented) of.

        I hold the opposite opinion. If we don’t teach our children our real history, we will simply raise up a new generation of flag-waving tools of the Domination System. A genuine education removes one’s blinders; it doesn’t reinforce them. We need to let the children (and ourselves) learn—expand their minds and, ideally, their hearts—by exposing them to the truth, even when it is a hard or uncomfortable truth. Let us get out of the echo chambers that do nothing but parrot things we already believe and enter instead into genuine conversation and civil debate with those who hold different views. In so doing, may we set an example for our children of how to think for themselves. Not what to think, but how.

Grace and peace,

bob