Growing up in the 80s, my generation watched and rolled our eyes at the Soviets and China for their blatant cover-ups and the lies they told their citizens. Our collective smugness came through in movies like Rocky IV.
It took me a while to realize that we, as American citizens, were arguably participating in something much worse. Whereas Soviet and China citizens were not told the truth... we simply did not want to know.
I was 50 when I found out about the Tulsa Massacre.
50!!
The US government did not have secret meetings to plot how to keep the true details of that story out of the papers. No committee forbade it being covered in school textbooks.
No, we as citizens have done the work of sanitizing our history. We don't want to hear anything that makes the Red, White, and Blue sparkle less.
Our version of patriotism is taking care of all the work despotic governments toil over.
1 comment:
I was 63. Totally embarrassed that I knew nothing about the Tulsa Massacre. 😢😢
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