that's a fact

  It often happens. I'm reading or talking to someone about something when I realize it happened over fifty years ago. We have all had that happen and laugh about it. There are meme's on Facebook about that. Time certainly does fly when you're having fun. Well as it turns out time flies in general, even when it isn't all that much fun. It was a while back when I was working at the grocery store that a young girl, one of the cashiers, asked me about the Vietnam war. She was doing a report on that for school. She figured to ask me to get that historical perspective from one that was there. She explained how that had happened so long ago and her history book really made little mention of it. I just smiled and said, sure I'd answer whatever questions she had about that. I did explain I wasn't a combat veteran though, so I couldn't speak to that aspect of the war. She did ask if I fought in Korea. Yeah, she figured I was that old. I told her that war ended one week after I was born. 

 I did read where the goal of schools is to update their textbooks every five to seven years. That may happen in some of the richer schools in America, but I can say for certain it doesn't happen in all of them. I expect it is a bit easier today to stay up to date than it used to be. But if you think about it the experts say every five years history needs to be updated. So. in a fifty-year period the textbooks would have gone out of date ten times! Yes, ten revisions since I graduated. Well, my grandson did tell me it was much harder today because there was so much more history to learn than when I went to school. I learned my history as current events! Yeah, pretty funny stuff. I explained to him that history repeats itself, so you really don't have to know all that much. Only the names change. I was shocked to learn some time back that the Book of Common Prayer I was raised reading had been revised and updated. The book I knew and loved so much has been retired! I'm so old the prayer book required updating? Well, that will give you something to think about.

 I do enjoy reading and talking about the old days. It's always fascinating to see or hear how others viewed all that. It's amusing when we all went to the same school, lived in the same town, had the same teachers and ministers, but experienced it differently. It's what we call stereotyping, I guess. Preconceived notions about the lives of other people even when you are sharing that life. It's doubly amusing when you remember their attitude on a particular subject from back in the day and they hold the opposite attitude today. Yes, people change over time. We like to call it growth. At least with ourselves we do, with others, not so much. Sometimes we just call that ignorance. I wasn't so aware of it back in my school days but am very much aware today, it really does make a difference who is writing the book. I used to think of history as the reporting of fact. I have learned that perhaps it is more the expression of an opinion on whatever fact is being examined. The fact remains, it was a war, but the why of it, well, maybe not so factual after all. 

 The past is what we remember it to be. That's the bottom line. There are those that wish to change that past and do so by omission. They just leave some things out. Today I'd suggest there are those wishing to change history by addition. By adding opinions to benefit whoever was affected by that past event. Some are calling it reparations. Reparations is the act of making amends for past wrongdoing. I don't believe you can make amends for the past other than acknowledging the wrong committed, and not allowing that wrong to be repeated. You can certainly appease folks that make some claim to the past, but appeasement and reparation are not the same thing. Yeah, it all comes down to who is writing the book. Facts are subjective things after all. Subject to time. And that, that's a fact.