Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

  The Fourth of July 2023, nice and peaceful this morning, it will change by tonight. Our nation is 247 years old, a meer baby compared to others. We have done some great things during those years. The establishment of a Constitutional government and the good fortune to come together to overcome some very tenuous events.

   Not all of our efforts have been benevolent to all that were present at the time. Remarkably most of our populace has come together at the more critical times to allow us to have the resources to overcome the more difficult events and allow us to best our rivals. We have been able to write history.

    Having that ability does not give us the right to change history to suit the whims of a few people that wish to suppress truth just to elevate one facet or subjugate another. We are the results of all of history whether that is the good fortune to have a group like the founding fathers to write our Constitution or the fact that some of our citizens held slaves or that our greed for land allowed the slaughter of those that were living on the land we wanted.

    There has been a movement to cut some people from the history books as their contribution seems unimportant to someone else at this moment in time. Do we pick the importance by which state they lived in, by what they accomplished or deed they did to make themselves known? 

   Take two women that had lives that were watched and written about, photographed and even celebrated in song by the same artist. One made movies and had her picture taken in the nude, the other wed a prince and became very famous for being very human and helping people and ending her life in a car crash. Their contributions were different yet celebrated for having made those contributions. One’s contribution has not yet fulfilled his future as one day he will be King.

   Many people make significant contributions to things that are pretty mundane to the average person on the street but they have an impact within the realm of what kind of business or enterprise that person works in.

   Shall we take out the people that did terrible things, Billy the Kid or Ted Bundy? Do we select those that had careers that were considered vulgar by some, Benny Hill or George Carlin how about Marilyn Chambers. They all have had an impact of some sort and their lives were important in ways not all can understand, but worth celebrating regardless of what kind of press they may have received.

    Do we really know what or who is not important enough not to included in history at some level? Not all needs to be known by all but at some point some little bit of information might make all the difference to someone. The number of things we guess at because we have no history to study is huge. The pyramids both in Egypt and central America, the mounds in the Mississippi valley.  Are they manmade or did these things get built by beings from outer space?

   We are all in the dark because we don’t have any written history. If we knew would it make these things mundane rather than exciting or interesting? Curiosity is what drives our train most of the time and what would life be without a puzzle?