On Erasing History: Painting over a San Francisco mural of George Washington due to liberal sensitivities

What is the best way to be certain we will repeat the errors of the past?  Before we attempt to answer this, let’s visit a coach and two books.

The best of football coaches – be they NFL or collegiate – are those who remember and teach the team’s history.  From the days of flickering black-and-white 16mm and 35mm motion picture cameras, right up today’s HD videos, football coaches have used game videos.

An idle study?  A pleasant pastime?  Not at all.  Our football coaches require their teams to review videos of past games.  Our own team.  Opponents.  Identify errors.  Notice weaknesses.  Learn from errors.  Improve performance.  Prepare for the next game!

If you want to see a stark-raving mad coach, try telling him you just accidentally erased all video of last week’s game!  A seething outburst of anger may be the least of your worries.

Now let’s consider two books.  One portrays the 1789 French Revolution.  This was just a few years following the end of our own American Revolutionary War: freedom and independence won from Britain, remember?  This book –

– reveals aristocrat tyranny as a cause of war and revolutionary excess, a result of war.  Charles Dickens presents us with visions of revolutionary excess with gruesome scenes of bloody guillotines.

If you fail to see what Dickens’ novel and our football coach have in common, let’s take a look at a second book.  This book features a wicked queen.  She destroys righteous men who oppose her, even priests and prophets. Another character in this book is an evil idol-god who demands sacrifice of children.  He uses fire to destroy children.  The queen?  Jezebel.  The idol-god?  Molech.  The book?  The Bible!

So, yes, even the Bible depicts flawed human behavior.  Such examples serve to illustrate errors.  Now return to the football coach.  His team studies errors along with “best plays.”  This is also why we read A Tale of Two Cities and, for that matter, the Bible.  The idea is to improve the present by studying the past.

In America it has taken us well over 200 years to correct some of our worst errors.  Why would we want to erase artifacts of our history?  Should we remember our past and correct errors, or forget and repeat our worst behaviors?

I argue in favor of remembering.  Historic art – like San Francisco’s George Washington mural, now set for destruction, is such an example.  Statues, bridges, buildings, highways, schools – everywhere we see proposals to destroy.  Books – yes, also the Bible – monuments, and art offer us an opportunity to learn from our mistakes and correct our behavior.

We should not hide our history.  We should use our history.  In all of its forms and genres, our history is the “how-to” book for self-improvement!