Despite how much and how stridently the Liberals and Progressives claim that Americans want to revise history, it they who are not only forgetting history but demanding that it be forgotten.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

– George Santayana
The Life Of Reason. Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense

To put it simply, those who cannot learn from past mistakes are more than likely going to make them again.

Americans need only look into the past to when we were the invaders who refused to assimilate into the native language, culture, sociopolitical tapestry of America and accept and retain those lessens.

Is It Too Late To Build A Fence?

The Native American tribes could have done things differently and stood a better chance of retaining their nations, cultures, languages…and lives. They, however, failed to recognize the dangers and act accordingly in the early days of the European colonization of America.

…All 300 Million Of Them!

This ended up leaving the debased remnants of the Amerindian peoples in an untenable situation. No amount of Ghost Dances are going to return the land to their tribes now or bring back their languages and cultures.

• Of the 300+ native tribal languages in the US, only 175 remain many without native speakers. This is expected to drop to 20 by 2050
• In the 17th Century Native Americans in the US numbered between 12 – 18 million. By the beginning of the 20th Century they had been reduced to 250 thousand

Now we, as Americans, are on the other side of the equation and we can remember this history or we can forget and face the consequences.

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As The Commercial Appeal reports it, some two dozen or so Tennessee TEA Party supporters want the state’s history curriculum changed.  Specifically, they want slavery and issues with the Native American tribes downplayed as compared to how they’re handled currently.

No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.

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The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at.

As one would expect, the MSM has made a lot of this request to the Tennessee legislature and, as one would also expect, the Liberals and their minority tenants are frothing at the mouth over it.

But are the requests of these TEA Partiers requests for historical revisionism or merely for a restoration of the curriculum as it was before the oikophobic Liberals corrupted the school systems with their own pernicious form of anti-American revisionism?

I know what the history curriculum was when I was in school and I know it didn’t hide the fact that the Founding fathers were slaveholders. It also didn’t make that, or any other societal flaw, the focus of the classes either.

That’s not, however, how history is taught in most states these days. The Liberals got control over the curriculum years ago and shifted it to focus on the negatives instead of the achievements of Americans. I can’t say for sure though that this is case in Tennessee or, if it is, how egregious the current curriculum is.

Restoration or revision? Frankly, I don’t know. Either seems possible.

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Throughout much of its history the Catholic church has relied heavily upon its religious orders. The orders fulfilled varied missions and duties for the mother church that were not best performed by the clerks regular.

VS

This has, not surprisingly caused some friction and competition between the various religious orders. It’s natural that they compete for funding, prestige, and postulants.

Two young men considering a religious vocation were having a conversation. “What is similar about the Jesuit and Dominican Orders?” the one asked.

The second replied, “Well, they were both founded by Spaniards – St. Dominic for the Dominicans, and St. Ignatius of Loyola for the Jesuits. They were also both founded to combat heresy – the Dominicans to fight the Albigensians, and the Jesuits to fight the Protestants.”

“What is different about the Jesuit and Dominican Orders?” The first asked.

“Met any Albigensians lately?”

That about sums that one up. The Dominicans ensured that the Catholic church’s “catharsis” was complete. The Jesuits, on the other hand, weren’t nearly so effective.

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