America’s Heroes
Trump is censoring images and signage from national parks and monuments that speak to the horrors of slavery and the expulsion of native people. He claims these items make Americans less patriotic and positive about what we can accomplish in the future.
It’s exactly the opposite. America, like every country, has skeletons in its closet, not to mention the bones rattling around in plain view. But we have something more. We have the abolitionists and the Underground Railroad. We have Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. We have Edward Zwick and the courageous troops of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, depicted in the 1989 film Glory. We have Abraham Lincoln, one of the wisest and most humane leaders of any nation anywhere. These are heroes we can be proud of, and they should inspire us to believe we can bend the future away from cruelty and oppression and toward decency, fairness and freedom.
Trump of course can’t understand this. We can see it, but only if we first see the scars of injustice as America’s heroes saw them.
