The Arc of History

During the 2008 campaign for the Presidency, Barack Obama addressed a crowd of supporters outdoors in St. Louis, Missouri.

In the distance, you can see a building with a greenish-copper dome. That's the Old St. Louis Courthouse, where for years slaves were auctioned on the steps... And the the same building where in 1850, two escaped slaves named Dred and Harriett Scott had their petition for freedom overturned.

The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Roger Taney threw it out because, as he wrote, the Scotts were "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

The arc has bent to a point where a black man is the democratically elected President of a nation whose legal scholars consider "The Dred Scott Decision" as the greatest injustice in that nation's history.

In theory preserving what's good about your past is fine... But only if you are honest, and selective about what you wish to conserve.

As the arc of history bends toward justice, it also exposes injustice and the hateful folly of its perpetrators.