The president has issued an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Like most of these executive orders, it seems illegal on its face: the president can only execute the laws; he cannot just himself decide how our museums and parks will work or look.
But perhaps the deeper problem is the implicit claim: that the president himself has a monopoly on truth and sanity, that we and a few others can serve as a ministry of truth, that all the experience and knowledge and research that the rest of us have is nothing more than “ideology.”
It maintains that the United States has always been a paragon of freedom and that anyone who denies its automatic progress is disloyal. But freedom always means liberation from the people who tell you that whatever you are experiencing now is liberty, and that really you must do nothing but admire your leaders. And progress, never automatic, comes from self-knowledge and from struggle.
I spent the morning today at the National Museum of Civil Rights in Memphis, which provides a firm reminder of the need for memory and for discussion of events that make us uncomfortable — as good history always will. We need history not to confirm that how we feel now is right, but rather to teach us more about where we come from than we can know ourselves. This involves recognition that our pasts can be different, which enables the empathy that we will need for democracy. I recorded a few thoughts along these lines in this video; please watch and share.
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