Limerick

Limerick

Knowing the past prepares us for the future. The only good in knowing war, misery, greed, incompetence, and slaughter is to know their true nature; the reality of their horror. If all that is known of the dark side of life is that it is undesirable, then nothing can be truly learned or taught from its influences on past events. The old saying, "learn from your mistakes", has no greater importance and impossibility than in this situation. The morals I was taught as a child reflect that I think that war is bad and hurting another is never a good thing. What I have begun to learn, and will always continue to build on, is the reality of what it means to actually kill another, what it means to go to war, what it means to live; all of which cannot be taught, only learned. In Limerick's work, she asks what is the point of retelling and reliving the atrocities of history? Limerick does an excellent job in presenting the question of why, and preparing a reader to truly think about what their answer is going to be. If I were to be asked why is it good to know about past discrepancies against my fellow man, I spit out the answer that it isn't right to wrong another. And I believe in that answer, but to truly understand what has gone before and what is possible in the future has an entirely different effect. The knowledge of those that committed the atrocities in the Modoc War, Bad Axe River and on even to WWII and Vietnam, gives not only the knowledge of the lesson, but a fear of the possible. It never strikes home, at least for me, when a history book talks about the who or the how many that got killed in a battle or a war. They are just tallies on a page. Tallies of how many injured, how many killed, but never are those individuals given names, given faces. Reading in a book that hundreds of people were killed should invoke in everyone a feeling of intense sorrow for the injustice of so many, but in actuality that response is found wanting in many people, not because they are callous to the subject or just don't care, but because without giving the victims names, giving them faces, they remain just tallies on the page. That is the lesson. That is the knowledge. That to know what has happened is to prepare you for what can happen, and to show that it is real and it is terrible.

The usefulness of history goes only so far as that history is understood. For the general public most history is taught much vaguer than it should be. Instead of understanding both sides of every conflict in every historical situation an overview is given of the events and the results with usually a bias in only one direction.

"The biggest puzzle in these summations is, of course, their astonishing assumption of simplicity. The stories of war are narratives so tangled and dense that they defy clear telling...The diversity of white people and their responses to war are gone. Instead, a coherent, linear, and most improbable of all, systematic eliminating Indian takes the place of the actual jumble of motives and intentions, communications and miscommunications, actions and reactions" (Limerick 439).

Limerick is saying that when history is recorded and taught, the incredible amount of interaction, reasoning, and intention involved, are never represented accurately. To cope with that inadequacy, history is streamlined into generalized assumptions. The simplest answer is the easiest to teach. But without the knowledge of those interactions, reasons, and intentions, history is misrepresented. When history is not looked at and understood in depth, it is useless, or