Toni
Contributor
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2011
- Messages
- 19,843
- Basic Beliefs
- Peace on Earth, goodwill towards all
Of course it is natural—as natural as wanting to be seen in the best light possible, of wanting to be worthy of your child’s love and respect. A parent must serve as many things to their hind, including as an example worthy of listening to, because how else will the child learn right from wrong?
Please note that I do not say that ‘natural’ means right or correct or perfect or even good. It is not the mindset that I had when I raised my own family. But it is something that I recognize in my parents. I know that my parents only told us partial histories of their own childhoods—partly or perhaps wholly because they did not want us to fear or despise some family members. My father was raised in very difficult circumstances. I knew his father was ‘rough in him’ but I was an adult before I comprehended that my grandfather was physically abusive—although beating the daylights out of your child for disobeying or making a mistake was not considered abuse in the days of my father’s childhood. I knew my grandfather as a sweet man who adored his grandchildren and sneaked us treats when my dad’s stepmother wasn’t looking. I am not sorry that is the memory and image I have of my grandfather instead of the one of him as a desperate, overwhelmed father struggling to raise his sons under very difficult conditions where small mistakes or a little waste meant going hungry and large ones could mean starvation. I am sorry that I didn’t have more of that context when I was a teenager because I might have understood my father better, although I would have disagreed with him. There are things from my childhood and teen years I will never tell my child seen, for some of the same reasons my parents didn’t tell me the worst of their childhoods: I wanted my kids to love their grandparents. Now it seems irrelevant. My kids are grown; their grandparents are dead. Am I ready got it wrong? How much of my childhood traumas do my kids need to know?
Obviously I wrote the above with respect to my own personal life. But I think many of the motivations are the same: some of it is ignorance. My parents didn’t hide US history from us: they just did t know a lot of it. I’m certain of that because I know what I was and was not taught—and my education was much better than my parents’ generation. They lived through very difficult, even ugly times. They wanted to leave that behind them and not let sins of of the past contaminate what they hoped were better futures for their children.
There is a line from To Kill A Mockingbird: “Let the dead bury the dead.” It’s a sentiment that in various ways permeated the thinking of my parents’
I’m not suggesting that this was the right way to deal with ugly aspects of our history. I am trying to explain why, on certain levels, past generations did what they did with regards to teaching the history. I think that it is much, much better to be as open and honest about the bad and the ugly, not just the good and the admirable,
Of course it is true and has always been true that history is written by the victors. And those in power are heavily invested in maintaining the status quo. Even if there is little power and not that great a status quo.
We think today about how terrible certain things are. I realize enough about my parent’ generation to know that for most of the US, comparatively speaking, we have things so much easier than did the generations before us. The Great Recession was nothing compared with the Great Depression. Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan were not as damaging to people in the US as WW I and Ii.
