Now What?

Today my son had me watch a trailer for a documentary that won the Jury Award at the Tribeca Film Festival.  The documentary is called: "The Revisionists."  This is about how the Texas State Board of Education is trying to change how American history is taught, or actually what is taught, by promoting a right wing religious agenda.  This is all well and good if it was just a person promoting his or her book--but this is about a major publisher of textbooks.  This is concerning the publication of a majority of books that might or will be published for the majority of American school children.  Should we be scared?  Anyway the trailer gave me the shivers and I think that we as history students owe it to ourselves to look at this documentary.  See if you can stream it onto your computer when its available.  I'm not sure if it is out there yet.  The producer was just on The Colbert Report recently promoting it so if it isn't available yet it will be soon.  The choice of extremism is never a good thing. Promoting an extreme ideology always leads to undesirable consequences.  I hope the lunatics don't get a firm foothold and lead us into becoming right wing fanatics.
Fortunately, higher education teaches us to reason and think.  More and more people do not have the advantages that we have as students.  We should be so happy that we landed in this class and got to read and learn about the different ways people were able to effect change: through an effective campaign, an effective form of political action, and WUNC displays.  Who knows when we might need to become social activists and start a social movement.
As thinking and reasoning people who have the ability and opportunity to participate in a democratic republic, don't forget that voting is your golden ticket that other people do not have who live without democracy.  Though I do believe that the game is rigged because of Citizens United and the Super Pacs, I still feel that we can speak loudly by participating in our democracy.  Right wing candidates usually win the city and local elections because few progressives and liberals get off their ass and go to the polls and vote in those "minor" elections.  We have an opportunity coming up in June and the big election in November.  As history majors who have had the opportunities to learn how things got so f--ked up we can be the voice of reason to those who really don't know what we history majors have learned.  If we become the people that we aspire to be, we might change things for the better.  Who knows?  Why not see what happens!