I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by a larger newspaper for the Fourth of July. It was a great experience, and I was happy to do it, but what stuck out to me the most was the one simple question they asked me; What was one story about why I loved America, and one story about why I was concerned for its future?
At first, the question threw me for a bit of a loop. I realized that, while I have always been very proud to call America my home, it had been a good long while since I’d truly examined why that was the case. After all, I write here about our crippling debt crisis. I also write about how I think our government is inefficient and in need of some reform. To tell you the truth, I’m not the biggest fan of politicians in America in general. So why? Why do I love this country so much, and why, for all of its seemingly innumerable flaws, do Americans continue to show a sense of national pride that seems to be an anomaly among Western nations?
I can’t answer for most people. But during the interview, I recalled my childhood, where my grandpa (whom I’ve always called Papa) sat me up and read the Declaration of Independence aloud every single Fourth of July to me, a tradition he’d continued from when my dad was a kid. Papa was a captain in the US Navy, and he always thought that learning about the history of our country and why we did the things that we did was incredibly important. Throughout high school and middle school, he took me on history trips to the East Coast so I could learn about the important battles, events, people, and places that made our country in the first place. Papa didn’t hold back any unpleasant information. By the time I was 12 or 13, I knew about what had happened to the Native Americans and how unfortunate it was, and I learned about the institution of slavery, and how nearly 700,000 Americans had died in a war over its abolishment. I knew that my country had done terrible things, and I’d always been taught it was important to learn about things like that so we never repeated them.
But I also learned about what made America amazing. I learned about how Patriots fought during the battle of Bunker Hill and others in the Revolutionary War, because they believed in the idea of a new nation, free of the restraints of the old world. I learned about how one of my ancestors in the south bought a slave so he could teach him to read and write, and about how he raised him as a son, something that was wholly illegal at the time. I learned about the pioneers who settled the West, and how many of them were simply seeking a better life for themselves and their families. I learned about Americans, and how Americans throughout our nation’s short existence have generally fought for and stood up for what they believed was right. Whether that thing ended up being right after all was said and done is another story, but no other group that I’ve observed has so vociferously answered the call.
I could go on and on about all the positive and negative deeds of America as a nation. There is plenty to go around, as with any nation. Critics of the day have long stated that the American education system only focused on the positives, and that we’d effectively been given a propagandized version of our past growing up. While I can concede that during the 20th century America may not have told the full story, and I can understand trying to remedy that, I think the pendulum may have swung too far in the other direction.
I recently took a course here at the University of Wyoming. It was an American History class, and the professor was excellent and very well-versed in the topic of instruction. I was extremely excited for the course, thinking about how we may learn about how so many people moved west searching for a better life during and after WW2, about how we created and preserved many of our national parks in the West during this time. I even thought we might delve into how Silicon Valley revolutionized the world, bringing electronics to the masses and creating unparalleled technological innovation that’s in use all over the world today. I recognized that we’d also probably learn about some bad things, about the Dust Bowl and segregation, and how the fight for Native Americans’ place in this country was not yet over. But, while the course was indeed fascinating and excellently taught, I noticed that we pretty much only focused on the negatives. We learned lots about how segregation was awful, and about how evil it was that women didn’t have voting rights before 1927, and how Native Americans were always fighting against an oppressive US government. While all of those things were bad, I kept thinking, “But when will we learn about all the amazing things America did in the West too?”
We never really did. And this isn’t the only course I’ve experienced this feeling with. While I understand the need to teach about what we’ve done wrong in the past, I can only help but think that maybe we should be shooting for true 50-50. Or, more simply, just tell the story as it is.
America’s story, like any nation’s, is messy and full of triumphs and failures. But I believe we should tell it as it is: a nation of people who’ve fought for progress, from the Revolutionary War to the digital age, while learning from our past mistakes. We must strive for historical education that tells the full, true story, good and bad. My Papa taught me to face both the tough parts and the better parts of our history, so we can build a future that lives up to our founding ideals. That’s the America I love, and the one I hope we’ll keep striving for and building together.
