Memorial Day
While watching older people grappling with dementia I wondered which would be worse, having your mind and yet not having the use of your body in one or more capacities, or having the use of your body, but not being fully engaged mentally?
Memory is a valuable asset. Memory is who we have been, and that makes up who we are. If memory is erased the past becomes as mist. People then live in a type of suspended animation.
History—a memory of good and bad, and as Thomas Edison, the famous inventor is reported to have said after experiments he was working on failed: 'Why— I've gotten lots of results, I now know several thousand ways that won't work.'
History is a memory which we can look to see the things that work and some things that don't. I've heard it said that the victor gets to write the history. For instance, the Civil War was about states' rights. Most what we hear or read, it was about slavery.
Many forget that America began as a business venture, not called 'America', but 'the New World'. It turned into a grand experiment learning as it progressed through its infancy. Slavery had been around for a long time before it came to our shores, and it survives to this day in other lands. It encompassed not just black people, but a number of other races. A black man was the first slave holder in America, and even though it's not reported, about half the slave owners in America were black. Like a flailing child learning to walk our Nation learned and grew, eventually rejecting slavery altogether.
