WRITING HISTORY FOR FUTURE READERS

Writing history, engaging history, helps readers.

What doesn’t help readers is writing bad history.

But bad history has an appeal, a great appeal.

Bad history writing plays to the audience who need their feelings and actions validated in a way they understand.

What do they need to understand?

It starts early when kids learn about George Washington telling his dad what he did with his new hatchet, with Abe Lincoln being honest.

Little Johnny might question things. Not right away, but as they age.

They learn about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and wonder if everything is a lie.

Without proper guidance from family members like moms and dads, without teachers standing up to do the right thing and teach history, fact based history, Little Johnny starts to drift.

Without exposure to authors writing history from agreed on primary sources, young people take to whatever serves their mood from whoever steps up.

And what is the biggest attention grabber?

Who Commands The Stage

Those making the most noise drill their message down deep in the virgin soil of uncultivated minds.

Consider screaming Alex Jones’ mug in full roar. The man is no teacher of any kind, not someone you’d trust with kids. Why?

How would kids respond to the shit-talk spewing out of his dramatic angry man face?

Adults who like the Big A don’t just like him, they love him.

Looooooove them some Angry Alex because his outrage is their outrage, the same outrage they remember as little kids asking their Pa about the sheets and hood he keeps in the hall closet.

The people who jump on the A-hole bandwagon have the sort of problems that speak to inadequate education.

Some of them are the people Trump celebrated with, “I love the poorly educated.”

Trump touted how many different demographic groups he won in Nevada, declaring that “We won the evangelicals. We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated,” before exclaiming “I love the poorly educated!”

Loving the poorly educated is a big draw? Who knew?

After graduating, Jones briefly attended Austin Community College but dropped out.

Alex Jones graduated from a Texas high school. But that was before the new educational guidelines.

A search on state high school education rankings put Texas at #35.

Oregon comes in at #37, but Alex Jones didn’t go to school here. If he did, he’d fit right in. He could have joined the stand-off in Eastern Oregon.

The poorly educated community has plenty of company.

Writing History For The Poorly Educated

Who’s up for this challenge?

Don’t start in #47 Oklahoma, now famous for banning books and teacher bounties, or Tennessee now famous for a good old fashioned book burning, or South Carolina.

There’s proposed legislation in South Carolina, the Freedom of (ph) Ideological Coercion and Indoctrination Act, that says a teacher can’t cause an individual to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress because of his or her race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, heritage, culture, religion or political belief. 

Adults who limit the scope of education because they can’t communicate the context of what’s being taught are doing no one a favor.

We All Start Poorly Educated, Some Grow Out Of It

I fathered two children and raised them from the beginning.

No absentee daddy with latch-key kids, I engaged with them at every stage of development.

One night their mother would read a book to them. The next night I’d read the same book with a few additions and subtractions.

“Once upon a time, and the end,” left out quite a bit and they caught on early.

We’d talk about the story their mom read and the one I read and what I should add. It was a fun time for all.

When they were older we had a weigh-in contest. I weighed in and told them I’d lose twenty pounds by the next day. We bet twenty bucks.

The next day I placed the floor scale in front of a towel rack with a towel hanging on it.

Facing outward, I pulled down on the towel until I was twenty pounds lighter then called the kids in to see.

They came in, took a look at the scale. I said they could pay me later.

The oldest came back in after figuring out I must have cheated and wanted me to re-weigh.

“Nope, you saw the numbers. I won, you lost.

“No way you lost twenty pounds overnight.”

“You saw the number. I did lose twenty pounds overnight.”

“Then you cheated.”

Tell me how I cheated and you don’t have to pay.”

“What kind of a father would cheat his own kids?”

“The kind of father that wants his kids to ask question and solve problems instead of looking for the easy way out and getting cheated by strangers who are good at cheating.”

They didn’t figure out how I lost twenty pounds overnight and still owe me on the bet.

The Goals Of Writing History For Inquiring Minds

Educational goals need to encourage students to see what happened, how it happened, and how it could happen again.

2022 shows a nation as mosaic instead of melting pot, as individuals instead of team.

Finding common ground means leaving ignorance in the ditch and climbing out and getting cleaned up.

We live in a society governed by established laws that people embrace for different reasons.

Some people embrace leadership in order to change established laws like Roe v Wade.

Which isn’t to say they believe they have the right to tell women what to do with their bodies, but they pretend to in order to raise funds for elections.

To them it’s business, just part of the job. In public they shout their holiness to the high heavens; in private they have travel plans.

For a nation in need of a father figure, so much need that an elected official like a president is seen as a messenger from God, how does someone like Trump still operate with a loyal audience?

Let’s hope the parents in the crowd will eventually be able to explain themselves to their kids. Instead of threatening them if they report on activities during a vacation trip to D.C. on Jan. 6, just tell them you made a mistake.

And it’s an honest mistake. You thought a skeevy NYC playboy turned realty TV star, with authoritarian aspirations, was a holy visitor.

You were blind, but now you see. Join with your kids and start writing history that makes more sense than the hogwash you used to wade in.

Find amazing grace together instead of the spoon-fed diet of crap you used to choke down.

Comments and spirituals welcome on this blog.