Traditions and History

My younger sister spent the past five or six weeks sharing her memories of childhood traditions. She wrote them as a gift to her children and was gracious enough to share them with her siblings also. I am very grateful for her written memories because they helped me remember more of the traditions of our extended family. I found that for numerous occasions, her memories were much different than my own and/or much more detailed. Traditions and memories of those experiences have helped to make us what we are at the present time and form a big part of our history. It is important to have traditions as well as to remember our history correctly. This is one reason why progressives want to change the history and traditions and traditions of our nation. In May 2008, Michelle Obama said, "Barack knows that we are going to have to make sacrifices; we are going to have to change our conversation; we're going to have to change our traditions, our history; we're going to have to move into a different place as a nation." What did she mean when she said that we would have to change our conversations, our traditions, and our history? We change the conversation when we put a different slant on the words. We change traditions when we stop repeating the stories of our national heritage, when we take prayer out of the schools, when we stop pledging allegiance to the flag and start pledging allegiance to the earth. Another way to change history is to say that white things are now black and black is now white. For example, President Obama has said that we are no longer a Christian nation. How can he say that when 92 percent of Americans believe in God? How can he say that when 83 percent of Americans believe that public schools should celebrate religious holidays? How can he say that when 66% of Americans celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday honoring the birth of Jesus Christ? History can be changed by emphasizing something different. What are the schools teaching our children? Schools in Wisconsin teach the history of organized labor but won't allow anything about Jesus Christ in their school systems. Other schools teach evolution but denounce the possibility that the earth was created by God. The people who attended the town halls were depicted as trouble makers - but not one of them became violent or was arrested. Those people who want lower taxes are depicted as people that hate the poor. Returning military veterans are depicted as dangerous to our nation. Tea party goers are simply ignored. An example is Time Magazine's year in pictures review which did not include any pictures of either the 9/12 rally in Washington or the tax day tea party protests that were happening all over the country. Millions of Americans protested out-of-control government spending, corruption, special interests, and the health care reform, but none of these was important enough to Time Magazine to be included for the year. If the media is brought under the government umbrella, we can expect that history will be recorded much different than it is really happening. I learned a very important lesson from reading about family traditions through the eyes of my younger sister. I learned one more reason why each of us should be keeping journals. We need to write history as we see it happening in order to have a foundation to judge what other people write.