How Can It Be?

IT IS AN ARTICLE OF FAITH within the conservative American political community that America is a land of traditional american values and institutions.Traditional American values, deeply rooted in history, ought to be upheld, because they have withstood the test of time,and are as valid now as they ever have been. Hence, America is a "Christian" nation, and a nation devoted to free expression, freedom of religion, and free enterprise. Or so the reasoning goes, something like that. Then someone comes along, like this blog, and points out that the trouble in Ferguson, Missouri is the direct result of three hundred years of black slavery, and a hundred or more years of segregation and second class status for African Americans. Suddenly, among the same conservatives to whom history is so terribly important, history is no longer important. Slavery is in the past, and no longer relevant. Segregation and Jim Crow are no longer extant, having been remedied by the evolution of America towards a more perfect union. Thus the trouble in Ferguson becomes entirely a product of modern manufacture, a trumped up charge against police officers merely doing their duty, and prior conditions of servitude and oppression are irrelevant, unrelated to the needless, irrelevant, inappropriate, racially (reverse racially) motivated protestation and violence. How can it be that in certain instances history and tradition play such a vital role in our present, and in other areas history and tradition are utterly irrelevant?