forward. I've often asked myself that, because to take an English example, consider Winston Churchill. He was an imperialist dick on one hand, and on the other guided the UK to victory against Hitler. And there's no way they would have won the war if the someone else had been named PM. History put him in the right place at the right time.
Now, look at Lincoln. A great president. Freed the slaves. Guided this nation through the nightmare crisis of Civil War - to victory. Really did a good job at that. But to the Indiginous Americans, not so much, because he literally opened the way west. Which, of course, led to genocide, and just a whole bunch of crappy, horrifying things like the Sand Creek and Wounded Knee massacres, and those schools back east where the army would round up all the kids on the res and force them into these boarding schools where they were forced to speak only English, and learn the white man's history and religion. If you read Robin Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, you will find out that only NINE Potawatomee elders even know their language because of that. And then look at all those skeletons they've recently found in those Canadian orphanages.
We can go through the same litany with Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and so on. A few truly good people stand out - U.S. Grant for instance.
But yeah, I hear your frustration. Same thing with those Confederate statues. I was raised believing Lee and the rest of the Secesh were 'noble' warriors for a lost cause. You know, like the narrative at the beginning of Gone With the Wind. Oh, gosh, how wonderful the antebellum South was! Unless you were poor or black.
So again, I don't know where it will go. I do know we DO need to have these conversations, and maybe instead of putting guys like John Evans on a pedestal, we can see them for who they are. Evans was Colorado's second territorial governor. Unfortunately, he was one of the major instigators of the Sand Creek Massacre, when Army forces killed more than 200 Cheyenne and Arapahoe in Eastern Colorado. Evans was eventually forced to resign as governor after he refused to acknowledge or criticize what had happened. So we going to rename Mt Evans, then? It has hit a snag as you know...
Problem is, talking about this stuff, confronting it, makes many white people really uncomfortable. I know it does me, because I considered lots of these old white guys heroes in my youth. I mean I read book after book, about Kit Carson, Wild Bill, Sir Francis Drake, Cortez, Hudson, Grant, Lee, Washington, etc. And, since I came up in the 60s and early 70s, the biographical 'young adult' novels about these men definitely had a white male bias.
We've got to do it though. You know we do. This nation was built on slavery and genocide. It was. And we have to confront that, talk about it, and start trying to put policies in place that heal us all. When we do this, then the republic can actually become the light on the hill that we all know it can be. But not until. Not really.
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