I am woefully under-educated in my American history, and for that matter about many significant historical events that have occurred around the world. I suppose that is mostly my fault for being an attention-challenged punk in my youth, but if I had had one history teacher in high school who inspired me the way several of my English teachers did, I might have learned some invaluable lessons from my history teachers. Regrettably, much of my instruction focused on the rote learning of names and dates. None of that information had meaning to me. No history teacher that I can recall actually made those amazing stories resonate with me. Apart from the Viet Nam War, I did not live through most of it. Now, when I watch powerful movies like “The Killing Fields” about the Cambodian genocide during the Pol Pot regime, or “Schindler’s List”, or “Saving Private Ryan”, or the 50 other great films about historical events that I have seen over the years, I better understand how every human struggle indirectly impacts me.
To offset our steady diet of bad news on all the major
news networks, Shauna and I have been watching shows on the Smithsonian Channel
on TV, and most have been very interesting. The other night, we watched a show
about the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion involved in the WWII Battle
of the Bulge. That battalion, comprised entirely of African American men, made
a substantial and heroic contribution to the imminent defeat of the Nazis by
the Allied Forces, at a time when the U.S Army segregated its soldiers on the
basis of race. I’m embarrassed to say that I never knew about this, but to learn
of the outstanding sacrifice those brave men made on behalf of our freedom was,
to say the least, edifying. Today, I watch the disturbing videos of George Floyd
slowly being murdered, or most recently, the clip of Amhaud Arborey being shot and
killed by vigilantes in Georgia, and I wonder what lessons from history we have
learned. Regardless of the circumstances, those men did not deserve to die.
When I grew up in Buffalo, NY, and the majority of inner-city
residents there were African American. I had good parents who steered me away
from hatred, and taught me to judge people according to their character. I realize
that racism is an extremely complicated issue, and it is a mindset that cannot
simply be undone. To me, hatred is hatred, clear and simple, and it corrodes
the fabric of society. The only antidote to hatred is understanding and
compassion. You can’t force people to choose to love over hate, but the more I
watch the “worst of mankind” reporting about what is going on today, and the
more I see the media lines being drawn between the left and the right, the more
I think the messengers are part of the problem. Walter Cronkite reported the
news, and his broadcasts were far more unbiased and worthy of historical
preservation than anything I see today. The more we listen to each other’s stories,
the more we learn from the mistakes we made in the past, and fathom the
commonality of that struggle, the better are our chances of survival.
As I lament in my song “New Constitution”:
“Fettered by the lessons we don’t learn from history,
Prisoners of the way it’s always been.”
Jamie Oppenheimer ©2021 ALLJamieOppenheimerSongwriter@gmail.com
