YOU CANNOT UNDERSTAND THE PRESENT IF YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE PAST

This morning on another site, a commenter replied to one of my posts on the current crisis in Israel and Gaza, asking me why I was pointing out “things that happened a long time ago,” and why I was not concerned about “what’s going on now.”

I replied to her: “You cannot understand the present if you do not understand the past.”

History is not just around us. It also lives in us.

For instance, I am the great-great-grandson of a Quaker Abolitionist who was a Conductor on the Underground Railroad; I am also the tenth eldest-male descendant of one of the leaders of the Germantown Quakers, the first group of Europeans on the planet to make the non-ownership of slaves a condition of membership in their community.

I am also the great-grandson of a man who was a “professional Indian fighter” and buffalo “hunter” who participated in the extermination of both buffalo and Indians after the Civil War. Eventually, he led a wagon train out to southwestern Kansas, where he and his family, and the other pioneers, established a town on what had been the lands of the Osage Nation, until they were “relocated” to eastern Oklahoma to make way for White settlers.

Those two backgrounds are about as close as you can get to diametrically opposed in American history.

When I was growing up, the story of the Indian Fighter was well-known in our family, and was told as a point of honor in the family story. The facts regarding my great-great-grandfather and the first member of our family in America were not known at all, and I only discovered them when I made my own journey into history 50-odd years ago to find the truth of my history.

Back in the 1950s when I was growing up, the story of the Indian fighters was popular in movies. John Ford’s westerns were almost all involved with that story, and his most famous - “The Searchers” - is about as unvarnished a piece of white racist history of the Indians as one can find.

I remember reading an interview with John Wayne - who starred in that movie - in which he made the claim that the people who lived here when Europeans arrived were not putting the country to its “best use,” which to him gave the Europeans the right to take the land and “do better” with it. That actually was a widespread belief back then. One of my first (of many) arguments with my father involved his invocation of that argument when I came home from school in Eighth Grade with a note from the principal that I had called the “Battle of Sand Creek” a “massacre” in my Colorado history class - a definite “black mark.” (History has proven me right; Colorado history books now identify Sand Creek as a massacre committed by white people who are no longer honored as “Founding Fathers” of the state - which they were in my history book.)

The argument that the original occupants of a territory are “wasting” an otherwise-valuable property and by so doing should lose their right to that land has long been used by conquerors and colonialists going back at least to the beginning of the European conquest of “the New World” and likely much further back than that. It is used nearly every day right now in Israel by some defender of Zionism who may also deny the Palestinians any historical connection to the land as a people, while he points to all the “improvements” that have been made to the country since the Zionists began returning in the late 19th century.

Nowadays in the United States, the Western as a genre is not particularly popular with the modern audience. Those Westerns that have survived to be considered classics are the ones that do not involve any part of the European conquest. Yet at the same time history books that do not follow the line of how the United States was created as “the greatest country of all” are under attack from the “real American” side of the political aisle for harming the psyches of (white) students who might be exposed to that history.

Did I mention that the United States is a schizoid country? It’s not the only one.

My personal journey to discover real history began at age 20 when I got smacked in the face by my best friend from Navy boot camp, telling me as an eye-witness participant that the “Tonkin Gulf Incident” did not happen at all like it was being officially described at that time as the pretext for America’s next war.

It was difficult to reconcile my love of my country with my knowledge that we were acting in what I thought was a very “un-American” manner. It wasn’t the first time I had faced that dichotomy, and the argument I’d had with my father about whether Sand Creek was a battle or a massacre was only the first time I had confronted the schizoid history of the United States.

You cannot understand the present if you do not understand the past.

By the time I woke early one morning 22 years ago in time to see the second airliner hit the World Trade Center, I knew enough history that my reaction was “Now we’re going to find out what ‘fuck around and find out’ really means.”

Most everyone in this country did not share my reaction. The vast majority’s response was one of wounded innocence: “Why did they do that to us? We’re the Good Guys!” and armed with ignorance that deep and strong, most people supported what turned into a new Middle East crusade that the majority now see - with the benefit of 20/10 hindsight - as a disaster that made everything in the Middle East far worse than it had been.

But most still see it as a failure of leadership to live up to our always-good intentions. Even a majority of those who now see what was done as a failure would still bristle if I said to them “That’s what happens when you fuck around and find out.”

I still think one of the best descriptions of we Americans and our effect on the world is found in Graham Greene’s novel of the First Indochina War, “The Quiet American,” where the novel’s protagonist - cynical British journalist Thomas Fowler, a stand-in for the author - describes the title character, Alden Pyle: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused... impregnably armored in his good intentions and his ignorance.”

Good intentions and ignorance are the two guiding stars of American history since the first settlers arrived at Jamestown and inserted themselves in a local Native American war - on the wrong side. Any study of our history will find that particular “dosie-doh” happens frequently.

When I argued with my father 65 years ago about Sand Creek, he ended our argument with the statement, “It happened. There’s nothing you can do about it.” By which he mean that I should accept the good fortune that came to we contemporary Coloradans as a result of the removal of people who had obviously “wasted” a valuable property - proven by how good things were in Colorado now. My father’s argument has been used by others I have engaged; I’ve come to see it’s the response of someone who knows they’ve lost the argument but are unwilling to admit that fact.

It’s true. History happened. You cannot jump in a time machine and go back to change it.

You can, however, choose how you will deal with that history.

In my own case, I choose to honor the abolitionists in my ancestry and I try to follow their example despite those acts being difficult to do at the time - my great-great-grandfather was subject to arrest and imprisonment had word of his work in the underground railroad become known at the time. I see the Indian fighter as not only a pox on his times, but as the source of the generational poison that infected my family to the point I chose to end it by not having children. My nephew is not a Cleaver; his history is new and beyond telling him he comes from people who fought to make this country what it should be and that he should follow his instincts about that (he’s got good ones), I don’t think he needs to be saddled with the rest.

I do use the knowledge of the Indian fighter as a prism through which to see history more clearly. There were no rose-colored glasses worn when I wrote the books I have.

There are people who don’t like that. There was a long string of “this review was helpful” clicks made to a reviewer of “MiG Alley” who accused me of writing “woke history” when I pointed out that the bombing campaign in Korea did not achieve its objectives. This despite the fact the words he particularly disliked - “the interdiction campaign didn’t interdict” - were a direct quote of Admiral J.J. Clark, the fleet commander who carried out a significant part of that interdiction campaign.

We can learn from America’s history - both the good and the bad. We can choose to keep trying to do the good, and decide the bad shouldn’t be repeated.

But it takes knowing both to be able to make any decision.

You cannot understand the present if you do not understand the past.

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