Past is the past and that cannot change

The recent letter from Cynthia Bensch was excellent. She is absolutely right on target. Until the media chooses to stop beating that drum and moves on to something else, you should publish her letter in every issue.

Many of us had ancestors on both sides during the Civil War, and I am sure that they were doing what they thought best for their country at the time. None of us should presume to be smart enough to look back 150 years from our perspective today, and tell the people alive then they were right or wrong in what they thought or did.

The past is the past, and there is nothing we can do to change it. Learn from it, yes, but we can’t and shouldn’t try to re-write it. Think, Ministry of Propaganda in Orwell’s “1984”; that is a direction that we could be heading if we are not careful.

We should be concerned with what we are doing today to make our country and our world a better place for all who live here. There is plenty of work to be done in the present.

There is no question that there are people inside and outside our country that would like to see America fail, and are doing their best to use the politics of division to tear it down. We all love this country too much to let them succeed, and they won’t, unless we fall into their trap.

This story was originally published August 18, 2017 at 5:40 AM with the headline "Past is the past and that cannot change."