The last two years have witnessed an unprecedented rise in the age-old war against the American past. But there are several logical flaws in the attack on past generations.
Critics assume that your generation is morally superior to past generations. So they use their standards to condemn the dead who supposedly don’t come to their feet.
Furthermore, 21st century critics rarely acknowledge that their wealth and downtime are largely due to past generations whose hard work helped create the comfortable environment of today.And what will the critics of the future say about the current generation that has experienced more than millions of abortions since the ruling in Roe v. Wade [que legalizou o aborto nos EUA], even after advances in technology that allow fetal viability outside the uterus?
What our grandchildren will say about us who emit more than US$30 trillions in debt – much of it as unnecessary borrowing?
What kind of society sleeps while murders reach record numbers in 6378926 of your biggest cities? What is civilized about taking money out of politics, endemic looting and car theft?
We are proud to see the education in decline, despite record investment in education?
Do you Have you ever stopped to think that we only achieved this standard of living and security because we were once a meritocracy that gave up evaluating the workforce through tribal affinities and old prejudices?
Our generation talks all the time about infrastructure. But when was the last time we built something comparable to the Hoover Dam, the interstate highway system, or the California Water Project — not to mention the fact that we landed a man on the moon?
If past generations were so toxic, why do we continue to accept, without proper appreciation, the moral and material world they bequeathed us, with the Constitution and Bill of Rights, with airports, roads and power plants? Have we defeated forces comparable to those of the Axis or the communist Soviet Union?
We are well aware of the symptoms of the current epidemic of hatred for the past.
One of them is the Orwellian destruction of statues. Historical revisionism generally reacts to the frenzy of Puritan mobs, not to democratic discussion and the vote of elected officials.
Where is the pantheon of sealing heroes that will replace Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt?
What kind of morality and accomplishment should be immortalized? Are the public and private lives of people like Che Guevara, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Margaret Sanger, and Franklin D. Roosevelt free from sin?
Racial obsession predictably tends to go in a single direction. Just like the Confederates, we lump all people together according to appearance, such as “whites”, “blacks” and “browns” – usually to stereotype the supposed evils of white supremacy.
But if we follow this tribal and simplistic path of caricatured struggle between oppressors and oppressed, future generations will assess the merits and demerits of each group in order to judge the role of individuals in improving or worsening the country?
What standard will be used to judge the world ignorant of racial stereotypes – proportional representation in Nobel Prizes, philanthropy, scientific discoveries and art versus murder, violent attacks, divorce and childbearing? illegitimate?
Immigration – when legal, diverse, measured and meritocracy – is one of the strengths of the United States, as seen in the case of hardworking people who chose to leave their land to take the risk of creating a new life in the United States.
But if the United States is such a bad and irreparable country, why in the year of 2021 almost 2 million of foreigners entered the country – illegally, en masse and with the aim of taking root in a supposedly racist nation that would be inferior to the country these immigrants leave?
According to an old idea, assimilation and integration guarantee immigrants the right to the present and the past of the United States as much as they had the right to the present and past of their native land. But isn’t the antithesis of this also true?
that immigrants shouldn’t even respect the ancestors who helped create the country they now eagerly inhabit and who, in order to preserve that same country, died in horrible places, from Valley Forge to Bastogne?
Never in history has such a mediocre, ungrateful and narcissistic generation owed so much to their ancestors.
Victor Davis Hanson is a historian and classicist at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
