Hiding From The Truth

OVER THE PAST FEW DAYS, there has been much talk in the media, or at least more talk in the media than one might expect, about the suddenly famous Tulsa race riot of 1921, as it has traditionally been called. For some reason, maybe because we are now approaching the one hundredth anniversary of this nightmarish disaster, it is coming to light. Only now we are starting to call it the Tulsa "massacre" of 1921, because the term "massacre" is considerably more accurate. since it involved large numbers of African-Americans, the term "race riot" was simply too convenient to pass up. The details of the event are now fairly well known to many but not most Americans; anyone not familiar with the event is strongly encouraged, indeed ordered to finish reading this essay, then immediately do the necessary reading to become educated. source material is easy to find; google and Wikipedia will suffice. The two most striking facts are that it all began with an ostensibly extremely minor event, so minor that something like it must surely have happened every day in every city in America, throughout history, and to this day. The event concerned a misunderstanding between two teenagers, one black, one white, a misunderstanding which triggered a virtual, if not an actual war. Almost remindful of how a stalled car triggered World War One, which is also worth reading about. the other outstanding feature is the degree to which the vent was almost instantly denied by Tulsa, and by American society in general, as if it didn't happen, or as if it was so horrible, so ridiculous, that the city and the nation preferred to pretend it didn't happen. For nearly one hundred years textbooks on American history have omitted mention of it, just as surely as they have omitted mention of Thomas Jefferson's hatred of the Christian religion, and of his sexual liaison with a fifteen year old girl who was his slave. But that's what history books, cities, people, and nations do; they behave like ostrich's with heads in sand, by going into denial at the approach of truth too terrible to accept. As Goethe said: "We resist the truth only because we fear we might perish if we accepted it". WE have done this throughout history. There has never been found, among ancient Egyptian writing,s any mention of Moses, the Exodus, and plagues of locusts. Maybe the whole Mosaic Exodus never happened; or maybe the ancient Egyptians preferred to pretend it didn't. After World War Two, the horrible nightmare of Hitler and the holocaust was pretty much swept under the rug, as it were, by Germany. All NAZI symbols were banned, and German children were given but the barest outlines of the war, with the murder of six million Jews brushes aside. only in recent decades have they come out from beneath the rubble, as it were. Russians are particularly adept at erasing history. "De-Stalinization" of the nineteen fifties, when the Russians decided to forget about Uncle Joe and his millions man purges, is but one of many examples of a country which, admittedly, has much history worthy of forgetting. One hesitates to even mention, to this very day, a certain terrible Tsar who released pigeons from the tops of the tower, but only after having broken their wings. These are but a few examples of humanity's capacity to forget the too horrible to remember. we all know from personal experience, or are told, that as we as individuals age we tend to filter out our unpleasant memories, or to paint over them with improved, happier versions. We do it individually, and collectively, for the sake of our sheer sanity. it is the duty of good psychologists and historians to fill in our blanks with truth, as a way of healing by remembering. So, maybe that's what we are now doing with the Tulsa massacre of its black community back in 1921, finally, after a hundred years, coming to terms with it, healing. In the spirit of times, it may take a good one thousand years for us to be ready to remember just who was president of the United States in the year 2019, or whenever.