Bar-rio Window

Something fun to do in LA with the kids and for free! On Aug 15, 16, and 17 tall ships from around the country will arrive and parade around the port of los angeles. You get to board the ships once they dock and for most of my family members who might show up, this will be a great adventure! Alas, for other members of my ethnic clan, these photos and the ships themselves, will strike a bad historical chord.

As a teacher, I sometimes have to be the lone contrarian voice in a tough crowd of students indoctrinated with the new "revisionist history" that someone(somewhere) figured kids need to be taught so they might grow up and sign up for organizations and political parties that hold a certain liberal agenda.

These beautiful and imposing ships can, and will, represent to many young hispanics a past to be forgotten or at least rewritten. The souls of the likes of Christopher Colombus, Cortez, Ponce de Leon, the vikings, Francis Drake and all their bloody past will haunt the bowels of each ship parked at the port and scare away the modern day "victims" of their historical transgressions. The past becomes the present. the injustices of long ago remain fresh, at least this seems to be more the attitude and ideas held by the more angry and radical minds of a lot of traumatized hispanics, but I don't get it.

To me these ships represent the human spirit of adventure and curiosity as well as progress and, yes, bloodshed. In August, when I take my nephews to see them, I will not revise history and will not dabble in the present quibble advanced by educational knuckleheads that Colombus, for instance, did NOT discover America, when, if viewed from the european experience, that is exactly what he did.

I will not try and deflate colombus's accomplishments nor minimize the sufferings of the natives at the hands of the explorers. the truth is that the good and bad events in history are often braided. The good and bad stuff are rarely divorced from each other. this is basically how and what i teach whenever this fascinating subject arises in the classroom. Enough with the all the propaganda!!

And thank God colombus discovered or ran into; raided; encountered; tripped over; bumped into; took a wrong turn; uncovered or located the "new world". Without this unique and and important affair we would still be frozen in the ice age.


for more info: Lafestivalofsail.info