Don Paul’s July 10 letter regarding Helena’s celebration of vigilantes made some legitimate points, but I would argue it failed to make a significant distinction.
Clearly his statement “Try as you might the past is the past and you can not change it …” is true. If we do not acknowledge both the good and the bad in the past, we cannot build on the “good” and work to avoid repeating the “bad.”
The challenge is to engage in dialog that helps us reach consensus on what parts of history fall into each category.
Celebrating the “bad” may lead some people to repeat it. The concentration camps in Europe stand as a stark reminder of a part of human history that should never happen again, not as a celebration of the atrocities that happened there. And unless we want a return to slavery and the forces that lead to the Civil War, our students should study it but we should not build monuments to the people who precipitated it.
So, let’s “live with the fact we had vigilantes” and work to understand what drove them, but seriously question if that is a part of our history that we want to celebrate. – David Cooper, Jefferson City
