Lest We Forget

There has been an abundance of news articles lately decrying or in support of teaching our students to think about the construct of "race" in a critical manner. In several states, laws have been introduced to limit what parts of American history are appropriate to teach our children in schools. As an educator and a father, here are my thoughts on the matter:

When I was fifteen years old, my father took me to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel. I remember how I felt when I first saw Marcelle Elfenbein Swergold's, "Torah," and at first thinking it was a sculpture of some sort of a thorny bush, until we were close enough to realize that it was actually a sculpture of twisted bodies and barbed wire. I remember the shoes, a lampshade made of human skin, the eternal flame. The experience rocked me to my core. But what stayed with me the most and still haunts me to this day, were three words.

"Lest we forget."

When my son was in the second grade, my father took him to Washington DC for two weeks for the same reason he had taken my sister and I to DC when we were in elementary school - to turn the history that we were learning in the classroom into something real, something personal for us. They visited the Library of Congress, Mount Vernon, the Smithsonian, Arlington Cemetery, all of the memorials: Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ford's Theatre, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,?and the Holocaust museum.

When Stefan returned, he didn't hate America or white people for the things he saw and learned about our history of slavery, plantation culture, the civil rights movement, Indian removal, or the sins of our "founding fathers." Even as an eight-year-old, Stefan returned with a sense of awe, pride, empathy, but more than anything else, an absolute conviction that equality and human dignity matter. He loves the United States of America, with all her beauty marks and blemishes, just like his father and his grandfather do.

Covering our ears and closing our eyes will not erase the sins of our past. Our history is well documented. Just ask Macbeth about burying the past. Stones will move. Trees will speak. The bloody truth will always eventually out. It's just a matter of when not if.

Our children deserve the truth. They can handle the truth. They MUST learn to handle the truth or else they will repeat our worst mistakes to everyone's peril, "lest we forget." They are much stronger than we give them credit.

"Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced." - Jimmy Baldwin

Or if you prefer the words of Moses,

"Only guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw, and lest these things depart from your heart all the days of your life. And you shall make them known to your children, and to your children's children." Deuteronomy 4:9

History is messy. Just because I wasn't alive when it happened does not mean that we should disavow or stop discussing it, even if it's uncomfortable. Nor does it mean one shouldn't make an effort to atone for it either.

On December 7th, 1981, my father and I stared down at the remains of the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor. I was eleven. We stood next to a family of Japanese tourists. Their son was my age and I wondered how it must have felt being them, being there, at a site so charged with emotion and all that it represented to those of us standing in silence. Later, they sat three seats down from me as we watched a video in the memorial's viewing room. I remember feeling angry at them. Their son smiled at me and I didn't smile back.

"Gomen nasai," he said. I didn't understand Japanese when I was eleven. It meant nothing to me.

In October 1993, I learned how it felt to be a U.S. Marine, standing next to a Japanese family at the Hiroshima Peace Park in Japan. Although I hadn't been alive when the atomic bomb was dropped, I still felt very sorry and somewhat responsible for that place and what it represented to the crowd of people around me. Some of them were in tears. I turned and apologized to the family I was standing next to. The grandmother had surely been alive when it happened.

"Gomen nasai," I said. I bowed to her and left.