Decades ago, I moved from Florida to Washington state after graduating to start my professional career. While conversing with friends they told me this outrageous tale that occurred here in the Pacific Northwest. The story goes that a whale had become beached in Oregon and died. The decomposing whale had literally become a stinking problem and the locals contemplated how to remedy this problem. They concluded that the easiest way to address the issue was to blow it up with dynamite, which would vaporize the whale.
Naturally, I was skeptical of this story. These were before the days of internet and YouTube, so I couldn’t verify it. One friend eventually coughed up a fuzzy video clip of the entire event as we huddled and watched the tiny video on his screen. Naturally, a news clip of the event finally lands YouTube.
The learned experiences of unsuccessfully blowing up a whale
The most interesting part of this event is not the dead sperm whale nor is it the fact that they blew it up. By far the most fascinating fact about this story is the disastrous results from that explosion. The whale did not vaporize, far from it. The explosion hurled portions of that whale carcass over 800 feet away (that’s close to three football fields) and some of those chunks were large enough to crush cars upon their landing, but still left most of the body on the beach. That occurred over 50 years ago.
Imagine that another whale ends up dead on another beach and starts to decompose, should we look to blow it up with dynamite again? Or should we look to learn from our mistakes, improve, and come up with an alternative? We don’t look upon Oregonians as idiots; we just aspire to avoid their mistakes.
When I mentor people at work, I reiterate that I’m not any smarter or wiser than they. They’re simply benefitting from my figurative battle scars and lost limbs from setting off landmines. They’re benefitting from my mistakes, indeed my history.
Edison tried 1000 combinations of materials for the lightbulb before he came upon the right combination. The difference is that he meticulously eliminated each combination as he tried them. He kept a history.
Which discoveries are too important to ignore?
I graduated college with a psychology minor. Through my studies, I learned about the Stanley Milgram experiments as well as the Stanford Prison experiments. We can discuss the ethics of such experiments, but we already know the results. They’re not necessarily what we’d expect, so their discoveries were that much more meaningful.
I had a high school teacher, Mr. Watters, who taught us about Joseph McCarthy’s mindless obsession and grandstanding about Communism. I still remember those lessons to this day. The irony? Mr. Watters taught English, not history.
We as a society have made mistakes before, our collective aspiration should be to learn from our mistakes. Believing that we’ll blindly, magically navigate around them the next time is absurd… not without understanding the history. The most effective way to avoid those mistakes going forward is to teach that history.
I know that there is now much talk about the teaching of Critical Race Theory and allegations that we’re trying to blame our white youth for the crimes for their ancestors. I have yet to educate myself on it, so I wouldn’t presume to establish a trend about the intent of what our ancestors did. There’s (hopefully) little debate about what happened, even if we disagree in its willful intent.
Teaching our racist history is the most effective way to avoid it
What happened in the 1940’s is that we gathered about 120,000 of our American residents of Japanese ancestry during World War II and put them in internment camps; about two-thirds of them were American citizens. Upon their release they lost their homes and their businesses. It took forty years before we investigated if this was justified, and we concluded that it wasn’t. Of course, when politicians talk about kicking out Chinese residents in this country loyal to China, it’s reminiscent of both this and McCarthyism. Though you need to know the racist history to see it.
What happened in the late 1840’s is that we needed to build a transcontinental railroad. Much of that work was both hard and dangerous, and we employed Chinese immigrant laborers. We didn’t mind the Chinese working themselves (sometimes literally) to death to build our railroads. However, we didn’t want them integrating into our society. We passed the Chinese Exclusion Act; yes, that’s literally what it was called. It was on the books for sixty years. Isn’t this the cornerstone of the Replacement Theory, to fear immigrants? Again, you need to know the racist history to see it.
What happened in 1921 is that a black teen was accused of assaulting a white teenage woman in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This incited so much rage that they took it out on, not only that black teen, but the entire black population of the city. Though how does a black teen growing up in Tulsa decades later not know about this massacre? Why are they not teaching this in history?
Have you taught your children to think critically?
Allow me to ask in earnest, if these elements of history were to be taught in school, what are you afraid would happen? Let’s, of course, make sure that the material is fact checked, in the case of the above:
- Many Japanese immigrants (most of them citizens) were gathered and locked in internment camps during World War II.
- The US passed a bill called the Chinese Exclusion Act that disallowed Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens.
- After one black teen was accused of assaulting a white teenage woman in Tulsa, Oklahoma, people, businesses, and homes were attacked.
And then present it to the students. As parents, do you honestly think that your children’s identity is so inextricably tied to being white that they will suffer trauma because of something that other white people did a hundred years ago?
Or are there bigger fears? How unbearable would it be for them to listen to these dark facts about our history and conclude that we’re not quite the ‘knight in shining armor’ that we make ourselves to be? Or perhaps what may be even worse is to find that their moral compass is different than yours.
As I think about this issue, I reflect back upon the last sermon scene from Footloose where the Reverend asks, “If we don’t start trusting our children… how will they ever become trustworthy?” Ask yourself the unsettling question, do you want your kids to think about the issues and form an informed opinion based on their own moral compass or do you want them to simply acquiesce?