Otter's Rock

I really enjoy Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman's Saturday morning "What the Heck Just Happened?" chats. It really does just feel like my aunties talking smack about history.

In today's episode (Video, 41 Minutes), they were discussing ways to think about corruption and how to deal with it—using Hamilton, Lincoln, the Nixon/Kennedy debates and Representative Maxwell Frost as examples. HCR mentioned that a lot of USian students don't learn the technicalities of how the government works, such as "this is the legal definition of [thing], and therefore the law says you can do [such and such] about it" (my paraphrase). And also how when exposed to this information, people of all ages are often amazed and eager to learn more. (Thus both women's teaching and social media strategies).

(I'm not especially ragging on the U.S. education system here; most Canadians don't learn civics either.)

Which reminded me of a class a few weeks ago, where (like most of my classes) most of the students are Gen Z, and either weren't born during the ramp up to the 2003 U.S. Invasion of Iraq, or were tiny smol and don't remember it (see me, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, "you're welcome" to anyone who I just made feel very old). The professor was explaining how it had been sold to the public, the WMD lies, etc, and its echos (or not) in current events.

The class was agog! They were entranced! They were listening the most sensational soap opera unfold! "What? Really!?" they gasped. "Why didn't we know this!?" they demanded.

"It's not taught," the professor answered; "it's not your fault that you don't know."

I think when I was coming up, history ended with the Cold War. To be fair, that was somewhat due to when the textbooks were written (and a couple still had the U.S.S.R. on the maps). In part, it's difficult to write about something you're in the middle of. But how much of what we're doing now needs the context of 9/11, and the second Iraq War, and the Patriot Act, and and and... ? And how we all understood that day that the world would never be the same. (Which also needs the context of events before, of course.) We all need to know this history, but not everyone who is in elected office today is old enough to remember it.

I'm just sad there wasn't time to tell them about Freedom Fries :(