S**t Happens
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."--George Santayana
When I was growing up in the Los Angeles basin area during the 1960s and 1970s, one of my school habits was to watch the clock, waiting for it to finally get to the time when we could go out for recess. Once out there, we’d run around pretending to be animals, play nation ball, tag, throw carob seed pods at each other, you know, the usual stuff kids do.
But every once in a while, our teachers would warn us not to run around, we were only allowed to walk or sit in the shade and not do anything that would cause us to breathe hard. These were the days when we had smog alerts. The air was too unhealthy for us to run around, and as kids, we always obeyed…nope. We ran around anyway, and invariably, we eventually felt, deep within our chest, a pain whenever we breathed deeply, followed by coughing when we exhaled. You could see the air was bad and brown, and it stung our eyes.
In January 1969, when I was 10 years old, Union Oil’s Platform A on the Santa Barbara channel had a pressure blowout from inadequate well casings, resulting in mud jetting 90 feet above the platform floor. Soon, oil workers noticed the sea bubbling from escaping oil and natural gas issuing from fissures in the sea floor. For 11 days, oil escaped at a rate of almost 9,000 gallons an hour. I remember seeing images in the Los Angeles Times of oiled birds and beaches.
In the summer of that same year, the Cuyahoga River in Ohio burst into flames, again. The pollution of the Cuyahoga River was almost a badge of honor for factories like American Ship Building, Sherwin-Williams Paint Company, Republic Steel, and Standard Oil, who all lined the river, which bore the toxic legacy of their success.
This was the 11th time it had caught fire since the first in 1868. This time, the difference was the nationwide attention the fire got from a Time magazine article with an accompanying photo from the 1952 river fire. This event, combined with the oil spill, smog problems in many US cities, and the first “Earth Day” in April 1970, prompted Republican Richard Nixon to amend the Clean Air Act and create the Environmental Protection Agency. Nixon also signed the Clean Water Act in 1972 and the Endangered Species Act in 1973.
These environmental problems were all mistakes created by humans pursuing profit, technological progress, and a more comfortable life. Afterward, scientists helped them realize the consequences of their impacts, and the government, guided by science and fact-finding, helped mitigate the impacts and enacted regulations to hopefully prevent them from happening again.
This pattern can also be seen in the financial world, where people blindly pursue profits. Things like extended credit, risky lending, buying stocks on margins, investing in “junk bonds,” panic bank runs, or automatic selloffs resulting in stock market collapses have all contributed to past economic disasters. Afterward, experts analyzed what happened and helped the government devise solutions designed to try and prevent them in the future.
That’s why we have things like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), created in response to the bank runs at the beginning of the Great Depression. Or the increase in domestic oil production in response to the Arab oil embargo and “Stagflation” of the 1970s. After Black Monday and the 1987 Stock Market Crash, Stock exchanges worked to block program trading, instituting “circuit breakers” that freeze trading when a benchmark drops too quickly. After the Great Recession of 2008, the Dodd-Frank Act was passed, which tightened regulatory control over financial institutions to try and prevent speculative lending and trading.
Mistakes happen; it’s a fact of life. Some of our country's biggest blunders were also the result of pursuing profit and comfort, oblivious of the human cost. Slavery was not unique to our country and has gone on for millennia, but our resistance to abandoning the practice and its lingering impacts is noteworthy. So was our country’s treatment of the native Americans. From forced relocations, broken treaties, indoctrination schools, to outright massacres, our country has done things that we are not proud of.
Why was I never taught about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921? It seems to me like it was a significant point in our history. Two days of fire and violence, resulting in hundreds dead and wounded, when white supremacists burned and destroyed more than 35 square blocks of one of the wealthiest black communities in the United States, known as "Black Wall Street”. It’s ridiculous that I only found out about it because I watched the show Watchmen. Did the powers that be decide it was not worthy to be taught about? Was it too embarrassing?
Whether it’s the environment, the economy, culture, or social problems, Americans have made mistakes; we should study them and learn from them. That’s the best way to prevent them from happening in the future. This is why it disturbs me to hear of our current administration trying to change how we view our history. Keith E. Sonderling, the recently confirmed deputy secretary of labor, said, “We will revitalize [Museums and Libraries] and restore focus on patriotism, ensuring we preserve our country’s core values, promote American exceptionalism and cultivate love of country in future generations”.
I get the idea that it’s unfair to judge historic figures from bygone eras by today’s standards. But at the same time, some of our founding fathers’ lifestyles were totally inconsistent with the guiding principles they espoused and founded this country with. Mistakes were made; we can use these as tools for growth.
In Donald Trump’s executive order titled RESTORING TRUTH AND SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY, the Vice President is instructed to “remove improper ideology” from Smithsonian properties. It also says the vice president and the Office of Management and Budget will work with Congress to bar funding of “exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy.”
Who decides what is “improper ideology” and what degrades American values? Where are the definitions? It seems like it’s just anything Trump or MAGA doesn’t like. Should we just pretend that racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice never existed? Or that they did and pretend that they are now magically solved, gone, never to be seen again?
The job of museums, interpretive centers, libraries, and other institutions is to educate and enlighten us about the stories that shaped our countries and the human condition – the good, the bad, and the ugly. Hiding them because they might make us feel bad or embarrassed is a sign of weakness.
Raymond Arsenault, history professor at the University of South Florida, St Petersburg, said:
“What is written in that order sounds almost Orwellian in the way Trump thinks he can mandate a mythic conception of American history that’s almost Disney-esque with only happy endings, only heroic figures, no attention at all to the complexity of American history and the struggles to have a more perfect union.”
This push to strive for the “proper” teaching of history, to encourage unity in our nation, sounds to me like what would come out of Russia, Hungary, China, Iran, and North Korea. Tope Folarin, a Nigerian American writer and executive director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, said,
“You cannot ‘foster unity’ by refusing to tell the truth about our history. Ignorance of the truth is what actually deepens societal divides.”
We need to revel in the shared history of our positive moments and learn from our embarrassing moments. Museums, libraries, interpretive centers (and schools, for that matter) play a crucial role in allowing people, especially children, to learn from and be inspired by trusted information and stories about our diverse natural and cultural heritage. I agree with Donna Brazile when she said, “Indoctrinating young Americans with fake history is educational child abuse.”
Shit happens, learn from it.