Lots of History Lessons

I've spent the past couple days being filled in on human history without trying. Thanks Netflix. 

4 shows people should watch: 

-Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States
-The Tudors
-The Last Czars
-Versailles (Yes it's cheesy and they throw too much unwanted fiction in there, but it still important to see. He valued his palace and invested in it and you rarely or ever see "peasants" -like they don't even exist). 

I haven't been able to make it through the movie Lincoln. Too boring so far. 

The theme that kept coming up was a Massive Amount of people in a country giving power and "representation" of the entire people and country to One Person -or one person in particular -and the inevitable corruption, violence, genocide, and ignorance that follows. 

And it's not just ignorance of a monarch to the sufferings of his people, but also the ignorance of the people to the extent of abuses from the monarch until its "too late" or past the point of insanity. 

This includes the United States. 

You can say we have 3 branches that check and balance, but that illusion has been carved away at for a long time now. 

And it occurred to me, almost nothing I heard about these instances as a child and in high school was "true". 

What you read about the Russian Czars: Rasputin was weird and bad and the Czars were a monarchy that were over thrown in a Russian Revolution. And watching the movie Anastasia didn't help. 

You read maybe a paragraph in a 300 page book. 

And Henry VIII -one of the most pivotal people in a pivotal time in European and American history: He wanted to marry a bunch of women, separated from the Catholic church, and had a couple of his wives killed. 

2 paragraphs. 

How can we teach history to children without jading them when the full brutality of the history of humanity is shown? 

You can't. So we don't. "Hitler was a bad man who did bad things."

Then high school hits, you read Night by Eli Weisel and you think you've seen the darkest moment in human history. 

But then American History gets convoluted. 

"We dropped a bomb on Japan twice because we were at war and there was no other way..." 

Then you watch and understand reality 10 years later to a greater extent and realize there are too many things America STILL hasn't atoned for and is tone deaf to. 

Truth is everything. 

It hurts. 
It's painful. 
It's dark and heinous. 

But so is ignorance. 

With Truth comes the power to Change.