This is the first year I’ve supported a World History class on my campus. Memories keep flooding back to my days teaching World History. In the first week, we asked the kids to tell us which invention they thought was the most important. We gave them several examples to choose from, but they could go off script if they wanted.

The light bulb moments are always the most fun when teaching. When you see students realize how one invention leads to others it is always a joy to watch. History has always worked that way. One event or one discovery leads to others. It’s the butterfly effect in action.

This is why the white-washing of history is so dangerous. You cannot simply erase one event from history and call it good. Those events effect other events and impact millions of lives generations later. These things seem insignificant, but nothing is insignificant.

One tiny example is the story of Henrietta Lacks. Her cells have become famous in the science world, but she only exists in relative obscurity. She died very young from cervical cancer, but before she died the Mayo Clinic harvested some cells to figure out what was wrong with her. They told her about her cancer, but in the process discovered those cells could keep regenerating. In effect, she would live on forever.

The Lacks family sued the company harvesting her cells because they never gained permission to do so. The Mayo Clinic asked the family if they could study her cells and they said no. They did it anyway. It seems like such an insignificant story, but when paired with other similar stories it helps explain why some people have a natural distrust of science and vaccines.

When we deny events like the Tuskegee Study we not only remove that event, but we remove context from our collective understanding of history. We well know these atrocities are not necessarily isolated events. Some of these events have never been a part of the natural teaching of history, but others have been. At present, there are those that want to say the Trail of Tears never happened. They want to call it something else. They want to say the Cherokee chose to migrate to Oklahoma. Sure they did.

When we remove the event and the context of that event then we fail to understand our current condition. We deny it exists. So, we explain it away as something else. People don’t have a natural distrust of people in power. They are somehow jaded because of their own failures and problems. They are scapegoating us for their issues. There is obviously no doubt that some of this is true. Success and failure both have numerous layers, causes, effects, and the like. Our lives are nuanced just like history itself. Nothing is ever that simple.

Understanding history has never been about blame or internalizing the mistakes of the past. It is simply about understanding them and understanding their impact on the current condition. If we understand then we can begin to heal and be a part of the solution. If we don’t then we continue to perpetuate it and compound it.

There are moments when things seem to occur to me in bunches. They are relatively small moments. We were told as soon as we got this virus under control then things would return to a sense of normalcy. It’s been nearly two years now and things haven’t gone back to normal.

It’s when you add all these moments up and realize that the world might never go back to the way things were. It’s similar to the taking off of shoes at the airport. It’s just a small change that serves as a reminder that things will never fully be the way they used to be. That’s a relatively small thing that only comes up in isolated and focused events. COVID seems to be effecting more than that. Beyond the death, illness, and economic devastation, it is the little things that seem to be the not so gentle reminder that life will never be the same ever again.

When I was a kid, I loved to read choose your own adventure books. I used to read them about sports. There was one in particular where you got to coach a team in the Super Bowl. So, I pulled the quarterback to see what would happen and then went back and didn’t. I’m sure every kid that had that particular book did the same thing. Kids are fascinated with the idea of seeing where things will go if you make a different decision.

Life doesn’t work that way. We don’t get many second opportunities to make a different decision. It’s looking more and more that COVID is not a thing that happened to us, but something that is happening to us. The distinction might seem like a fine one, but it is simply a reflection that the decisions made in December, January, and February of 2019 and 2020 are still impacting us today. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say the decisions that were not made.

I had lied to myself and told myself there was no way of knowing how bad this would become, but it is a lie. As a nation, we saw how bad it got during the Spanish flu. Moreover, we saw how much grief and loss we avoided during H1N1 and Ebola. We’ve seen pandemics handled badly and we’ve seen them handled well. We know exactly what happens when you idly sit by and do nothing. We knew exactly what to do and our leaders did what they do best. They fumbled the ball and tried to tell you none of it really happened.

This wasn’t a bad hurricane the government failed to clean up afterwards. This wasn’t a tax cut gone awry. This wasn’t a war that seemingly went on forever for no reason. Those are bad enough and those impact entire generations or regions of the country. This impacted every region. This impacted every generation. This will continue to impact all of us. We aren’t going “back to normal” and the sooner we realize that the better.

In the backdrop of all of this, the man that did all of this won’t go away. Not only does he not have the sense of shame to hide in his isolated greenside bunker, he continues to say he won. He says he will win again. The architect of the single biggest health catastrophe in our nation’s history won’t go away. Like the societal changes due to COVID, I guess he can’t. Maybe nature will do us a favor on both counts.

It began innocently enough. A disease was spreading overseas and it was killing millions of people. Yet, everyone in America felt secure. These things don’t happen to us. After all, diseases don’t travel across oceans, so that was a problem for other countries to worry about.

Of course, we know that’s not how it turned out. Someone travelled overseas and brought the disease back home. It started with a few cases and quickly began to spread. The government reacted with it’s best advice it could give. They suggested social distancing. They suggested masks. They suggested that people should wash their hands more vigorously.

Unfortunately, some people refused to follow these guidelines. “I’m from ‘Murica” they said. “Nobody tells me what to do.” Others didn’t say those things but they thought they were healthy. Weak people died from that stuff. Old people died from that stuff.

Except, this virus attacked healthy people. Healthy people were vulnerable. Healthy people were the ones hit hardest. When all the dust had settled, 675,000 Americans had died. I’m sure many of you have caught onto the details of the story. This particularly tale involves the 1918 flu pandemic.

That one started in Europe while the current one started in Asia, but otherwise the stories are eerily similar. When we learned about the 1918 flu in history we just chalked it up to people not knowing any better. Medicine was not nearly as advanced and the public was not nearly as educated about disease prevention.

We’re smarter now. We know more about hygiene. We know more about medicine. We have more advanced hospitals that can treat these things. The current pandemic has claimed nearly 610,000 lives in the U.S. alone. Families have been irreparably torn apart.

What’s remarkable is that after 100 years, this story is not all that foreign to us. Millions of Americans could tell a story about someone from their family back then and could tell a similar story today. The opening paragraphs could just as easily describe the current pandemic.

No one would dare deny the Spanish flu. It has become an integral part of our U.S. History curriculum. There are numerous events we don’t cover that we absolutely should. That is not one of them. Anyone who’s family has been in the country for over 100 years probably has their own story to tell. It is impossible to get through history without telling those stories.

Yet, here we are. We still have people denying the virus. We still have people that shunned the suggestions about wearing masks, practicing social distancing, and improving personal hygiene. We still have people that distrust the government enough to deny all kinds of advice and rules.

The sad thing is that those people were not the ones most effected. Somehow you knew that would happen. So, we begin to take stock in what we’ve learned. First, we learn that there are parallels for almost everything in history. Sure, technology improves and knowledge comes with that, but history often repeats itself. Second, even though we discuss these things in history, there will always be those that don’t learn or don’t see the connection.

It seems impossible, but we are destined to pass the 675,000 mark. We are destined to do it because a group of Americans are too stubborn to admit they were wrong. You can hear them cry hoax all the way to their hospital beds and ventilator units. You can hear them cry hoax to their super spreader events. You can hear them cry hoax as they watch yet another loved one or family friend die.

You can also see a high school student 100 years from now learning about COVID. They will think to themselves that it was a shame how ignorant the people were back then. Why didn’t they learn from 1918? It might even be a history they are doomed to repeat themselves.

The NY Times did a study of eight states’ US history textbooks including Texas, and it ain’t pretty.  Printed by the same publisher, the books differ in discussions of race, slavery, the Civil War, sexuality, and gun rights.  And if you guessed that Texas tilted the texts to far right ideology, you would be correct.

Enlightening (and depressing) read.

Nixon=Trump; Cox=Comey; Watergate=Russian; Richardson=Yates; Ruckelshaus=Bharara

Kissinger=Tillerson; Brezhnev=Putin

Mideast Cease-Fire Plan still on the table, 45 years later.