Happy face history

Laws in several states have criminalized criticizing American history, even when that history contains criminal acts. It is sort of like putting a happy face on American history.

Look, I love my country, warts and all. I love it because, since her inception, she has offered the promise of hope, a promise of a better life for her citizens, a new way of treating citizens. She still offers that promise and, in fits and starts, fulfills those hopes, but to imagine that you can have a great nation, in Lincoln’s words, “…conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” without looking backward at our dark side is unproductive. It is like forgiving the sinner who doesn’t acknowledge sinning. 

Nikky Haley’s simplistic answer when asked about the causes of the Civil War was an example of sanitizing history according to the gospel of Ron DeSantis: that there was a political division in the nation caused by economic differences between the northern and southern states and how it was feared that action by the federal government would affect the economies in the southern states. OK, but those southern economies were based on slave labor. There is no doubt in the historical record of that. You can have your own opinion about slavery being OK, but you can’t ignore its existence.