Universe Log 7: Deleting The Past

    I don't need to tell you that history is full of ugly stains. That's obvious to anyone who's been on this planet for any substantial amount of time. Even young children know that the Civil War happened, and with that knowledge comes the knowledge that it was fought over slavery, which means the knowledge of what slavery is.

   And then you learn that even after we got rid of slavery, that didn't stop us from oppressing black people for the next century with segregation, discrimination, lynchings, and the like. Racism is still prevalent today, which to me is baffling that after all this time, some people still think that skin tone and heritage somehow has an effect on one's worth as a person.

   It's not even black people we were racist to. We made Irish people fight Chinese people on a race across the country to see who could finish a railroad faster. And that's not mentioning all the other hatred on minorities. And we didn't even let women vote until 1920!

   Look at me, I scream majority. I'm a straight white guy with brown hair and brown eyes. I'm right-handed, average height for my age, and if you look at my ancestry, you're gonna see a whole bunch of western Europe. 

   I'll be the first guy to admit I don't know what it's like to be a minority and I never will. But that doesn't mean racism is any less disgusting when it's directed at a white person, but it also doesn't mean that I know or exactly relate to how minorities see things.

   That being said, I wanna get to the main meat of this episode. As I'm sure you've noticed, people are starting to... rebel at the darker points of our history. Things from the past are being censored for the unsavory parts of it. Old movies with offensive scenes are removed from streaming, or at least the offensive scenes are. Books are banned from libraries. You know what I mean.

   I think the idea of censoring the dirt in our history is ridiculous. Pretending bad things didn't happen doesn't mean they didn't, or make them any less ugly. We have to face that these things happened. We need to see it and face not just the good parts of our history, but also the bad. How are we going to improve if we don't acknowledge the wrong that has happened?

    I think it was Disney+ but I'm not sure, but some company started putting warnings at the beginnings of stuff if the content contains offensive material. I think this is the way to go. This way, you're still acknowledging what happened and not hiding from it, but you're still warning anyone who might be hurt by it beforehand.

    I've said it before, and I'll say it again: true patriotism isn't blindly loving your country and seeing no wrong in it. That's just delusion. True patriotism is criticizing your country's flaws and hoping for the best for your country, and wanting it to improve. A good parent doesn't stop parenting if their kid gets straight A's, always comes home on time, and doesn't misbehave or talk back. You still have to parent them and raise them. You don't just think "I love my kid!" and then kick back on the couch and let them do whatever they want for the rest of forever.

   Oh well, I think you get my point.