The other day I blogged about needing an apology from my old school district. Some of you got the irony....some didn't, then yesterday....I read online that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer was going to be edited....leaving out the "N" word. I think I'm a little bewildered by the people who feel the need to apologize for or change history so that it is socially acceptable to everyone and not controversial at all. Do people really not understand that when that book was written that's the way things were? That's the language that was used and the "N" word was not always used in the connotation that we hear it today. It was descriptive of who they were. Don't get me wrong, I don't condone the use of that word today, by anyone , but I can tell the difference between then and now.
I guess what I am really confused about is our incessant need to apologize for history. I was not at Custer's Last Stand, The Little Big Horn, nor was I on the committee that established reservations. I was not in Africa as the Africans sold their "brothers" into slavery nor on the boat with them as they were taken to many countries including the U.S. I was not in Egypt as their slaves were building pyramids nor was I loading the Chinese into boats to come build railroads.
Should we put clothes on "Venus de Milo"? Should we paint in a camisole for the Mona Lisa? Should we put robes on the Angels in the Sistine Chapel? Should we change the "Diary of Anne Frank"? Should we take everything out of the Bible, Torah, Koran,etc, that might offend someone? Where do we stop? Where do we draw the line? Why can't we accept our history , learn from it, and improve our future? Why do any of us, today, owe an apology to anyone for our history of the past century? Shouldn't we get on with the business of making sure none of the bad things from the past are repeated in the future? To coin an outdated phrase....."I'm just saying....."
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