We should all be writing.
Journals. Blogs. Letters to the editor. Letters to others. Letters to representatives. Emails. Facebook posts.
We need to be recording for history what is going on and how we feel about it.
They say that history is written by the winners. I don’t agree. I believe history is written by those who have the most to gain by revising history.
There is a difference between ‘recording’ history and ‘rewriting’ history. We are seeing this happening in 2017. There are those in public life who don’t seem to understand that technology makes it easy to find the videos from the past that document a statement. You can try to deny that you said something but someone will find that video and publish it to prove you are lying.
The current problem is not just the lying about the past, even the recent past. What is most disturbing to me is the large number of people who have been brainwashed by lies and who think they are informed.
What will history do when they unearth two vastly differing versions of contemporaneous descriptions of 2017 America?
We don’t know what 2020 America and beyond will look like, but if we don’t fix the disinformation problem, the divide will only widen.
Write. Write now. We needed the diary of Anne Frank and the writings of Viktor Frankel to understand Hitler’s Germany. What will survive these current times to document what we are experiencing?
Be the scribe. Record your experiences. Tell history the facts.