Rewriting History

IN THE PRECEDING EPISODE, I discussed a lady, and the fact that I live in a "free" country permits me to divulge her name, Jill Ciment, who made the mistake of falling in love with her forty seven year old high school art teacher when she was seventeen, marrying him, and living happily ever after. a writer herself, she later in life, at the age of 41, wrote a book about her experience as a child bride, then over twenty years later, in her mid sixties, she wrote another, from an entirely different point of view. The advent of the "me Too" movement woke her up to the fact that her husband, now deceased, had in the beginning in fact been a sexual predator. So there you have it; a long and happy marriage which began as an act of sexual molestation, rape, if you will. The reader is invited to decide for him or her self. The same is true for everything else having to do with the past, for all of history. that's what makes history such an interesting, as well as important, subject. Its largely a matter of opinion. You would tend to think otherwise, that history is written in stone, in terms of facts and events, and that it would all be settled. Quite the opposite is true. Consider American history. People of a certain age will recall when American history was taught in public schools from the point of view that the United States could, in the past, do no wrong. What we today call theft and genocide we Americans once celebrated as a courageous expansion of civilization, a process in which we generously offered the savage natives to join us in civilized culture, or else. We Americans are making it perfectly obvious, much to our national embarrassment, that current events, so current as to be happening in front of our noses, can be interpreted in vastly differing ways. History, which is far less accessible than the present, is infinitely more vulnerable to unlimited interpretations and explanations than events we see happening with our own eyes. Its even possible, in our world of complications, to look back on your own life, on a long and happy marriage, and wonder whether it was good...or bad...Probably, like most everything else, it was both.