Sunday, June 30, 2024

Sunday Reflection: Remembering Mistakes




"We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them." -- Lillian Hellman (6/20/1905 - 6/30/1984), from her 1976 memoir "Scoundrel Time." The author of such works as "The Children's Hour," "The Little Foxes," and "Watch on the Rhine," Hellman was blacklisted in Hollywood during the Joseph McCarthy / House UnAmerican Activities Committee era for her Communist Party identification and pro-Soviet sympathies. 

With the sanitizing of America's racial and civil rights history texts by right-wing MAGAts and the likes of Ron "Bootsie" DeSantis, it's important to remember that no matter how they try to lessen their feelings of guilt or responsibility, history will always be shadowing them and correcting them until they fall silent.

(photo: CPL Archive/Everett/Rex Features)