Truth or rose-colored glasses

Pollyanna is a character in a novel that has become a characterization. If a person is described as being in a Pollyanna state of mind, it is because they have an overly optimistic perspective on an issue or person. It would not be beyond the realm of possibility that a person who has a Pollyanna view of things would even be described as wearing rose-colored glasses. When a community wears’ rose-colored glasses then it is time to have an examination to improve the prescription.

The dialogue and discourse of our political environment is filled with people on the extremes who try to frame every conversation around the point of view or position that they are promoting. A recent talking point of the Civil War being a fight for the 2nd Amendment Rights of African Americans is an example of this. The least likely result of this was arming every black person, bond or free, when the reality was that they had weapons as a normal course of living during that time to hunt and eat.

The disagreements of this horrific time in our history were filled with conflicts over economic interests and governmental authorities. The slave trade was a powerful economic concern for the southern states and a dispute about who had the authority, the states or the federal government, to determine its legality was at the core of this dispute. There is no evidence that would support the Civil War was about the 2nd Amendment Rights of any group or person. Gun ownership has never been on the table in reference to this time.

This type of misuse of information is abhorrent and an insult to the brave soldiers who stood on those battlefields fighting for the ideas of the United States of America. The same rose-colored glasses that make this assertion about the war being for the rights of African Americans to bear arms do not want the history of these same people taught in classrooms across the nation. This approach is in conflict with the First Amendment about freedom of speech and would allow for there to be book burning as a way of social control. Censorship is worse than denying gun ownership, that’s why it is the First Amendment.

It is unhealthy to try to rewrite history with these types of statements. Just because a person tells a lie for a long time and very loud does not change that it is a lie. Making our community, state and nation great is a process that requires us to perpetually move forward. The Earth does not change its rotation with every generation, It would be cataclysmic for it to go backward. A Pollyanna or rose-colored view of the past will not improve the future. George Santayana is credited with having said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

If we allow misinformation to operate as our truth then we will be headed right back into the kind of conflict that existed before, except the ideas we are fighting for will be corrupted.

HHJ News