If you haven’t had junior year history class yet, there’ll be a week or two there before you study Lincoln and the Civil War where you study the eight guys who came before Lincoln. Mr. Bigelow does a really good job at turning the few pages in the textbook about the eight presidents prior to Lincoln into about a week of lessons, before spending about a week (if not more) on Lincoln and the Civil War. This is no fault of his, seeing as there is nothing exceptional about the eight presidents who came prior to Lincoln and the history books make that VERY clear. I couldn’t even remember their names (except for the loml, James Buccanon. No, not the winter soldier, the 15th president of the U.S.A.). Let me tell you their names: Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan. You get special points if you’ve ever heard of any of them. Anyways, these men have worked wonders in the worlds of racism, taking land away from Native Americans, and taking land from Mexico because they felt like it. I’d like to make an argument for why important bad men, like some of these guys or our last president, Mr. Trump, should either be remembered or forgotten. 

History has forgotten bad men because they did no great deeds. Now in society today we like to claim that no one should be forgotten, so why should we push these guys out of our minds? There’s a nice little saying, “If we don’t learn history, we’re doomed to repeat it.” We didn’t learn our history, and today most of America still treats the Native American population like they don’t exist, and Trump just spent the past four years trying to get Mexico to pay for a wall to keep out its own citizens. Sound familiar? While yes, Trump didn’t annex Texas because he felt like it (James K. Polk did!!!), but the general disrespect for another country to an extent where you almost go to war with them is still fairly close. We need to tell our children the worst stories so that we don’t watch them become characters in it. 

“If we don’t learn history, we’re doomed to repeat it,” right? Well, my fifth grade teacher hammered the Civil War into my impressionable mind as something that probably shouldn’t happen again and I was grateful for it, but then I watched some dudes march on the capitol a week ago, and I realize that this saying might have absolutely no meaning whatsoever. We teach our children about evil Hitler and the atrocities of the holocaust and yet, we let genocide happen in China, and most Americans don’t bat an eye. Learning the atrocities of the past means nothing if we don’t have morals to stop them when they seemingly happen again in the future. So all we can do then is to encourage people to be good. To remember Trump or forget him is meaningless if we can’t stick together when things get tough. So here’s the conclusion of my article: Be good people. 

The End.