Beyond the walls of our school, outside the boundaries of our town, above the knowledge in our heads, there was another America, another world. It had always existed, but we were unaware because no one dared to speak of such things. Battles were being fought over issues we couldn't understand, because the truth behind them had never been revealed to us.
Our teachers taught us well, but a lot of what they gave us was the Official Story, bedtime tales and myths to give us that warm and fuzzy feeling that adults felt we needed. The puny brains of children couldn't handle the complexities of the real world and all its problems.
Yet children have always understood the truth, have always seen with open minds. Maybe if we had been taught the truth from the very beginning, the real world of 1960 wouldn't have been so shocking; so hard to understand.
We pledged allegiance to it every day. To freedom and justice. Had we understood it all maybe we would have questioned things. Things like praying a Christian prayer every day when we were supposed to be a nation of religious freedom, and that government had no right to force us to worship a certain way. We would have asked why people with darker skins than us needed laws passed so they could vote and go to college and to sit at a lunch counter at Woolworth's.
Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred ninety two, to find a passage to India, and to prove the world was round not flat, but what he really wanted was gold, and lots of it, and everybody knew the world was round to begin with. Besides, all those Indians would make wonderful slaves now, wouldn't they?
Who would tell us that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers who fought for the freedom of all men owned slaves? We would ignore the contributions of black men and women in our history the same way we would ignore them in the street. Live and let live, but stay away, and if you don't like it, you can go back to where you came from.
We did not know that our newest state, Hawaii, was stolen from its people by American businessmen and missionaries who thought they knew what was best.
Mexicans fought alongside Davy Crockett at the Alamo, because after all, Texas was Mexico, but someone decided to leave those little details out.
Bad people were Communists, plain and simple. Russians and Chinese were bad and evil godless creatures, because they believed the teachings of a man named Marx, and it wasn't Groucho. But it wasn't Communism we had to fear, it wasn't an economic state of mind that was the danger, it was dictatorship slapped with a veneer. It was the suppression of human rights that was the real enemy, and if we had been taught the truth we would have known that Americans were suffering too.
If we had known the truth, what Rosa Parks and Jackie Robinson had done would have made sense. What the bus boycott in Alabama did would have inspired us. We would have cheered for Cassius Clay as he won the gold in the Rome Olympics.
John F. Kennedy's run for the presidency would have been more exciting. We would have hope for the future that maybe all the lies of the past might be laid to rest, and that something wonderful might be happening.
We saw a grown man, Nikita Kruschev, having a temper tantrum in front of the entire world, banging his shoe at the United Nations, carrying on because he and his nation were being criticized. What was that to us? Just a crazy Russian, an evil, godless Communist behaving badly, but if we knew the truth about him and his kind we truly would have understood the danger and why we had to worry about nuclear war.
It seemed to me that the world was going mad. People were going crazy and complaining for things they already had, at least that's what I'd been taught. This was America, right? We were the good guys, the land of the free, the home of the brave, weren't we? What had we done wrong, and why should we let those crazy Commies try and push us around? Couldn't we just blast them all to Kingdom Come and be done with it?
If only someone would just tell me.
Tell me the truth, tell us all the truth, then maybe we could see.
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