In school, I learned U.S. history through a shallow, carefully constructed narrative that was more concerned with instilling patriotism than it was with imparting contextualized, factual accounts and records of times that came before. What I learned is America started when England was trying to tax us to pay for their imperialism and foreign wars and we didn’t like that, so we fought a revolution and then we didn’t have to have a king anymore and we were free. Most of us. Next up in the timeline was slavery, which was bad, but we fought the Civil War and then didn’t have slavery any more, which was good.
Around that time, the country was expanding and we couldn’t share the land with the native peoples, so we forced them west, which was sad. And then we never talked about them again, except a casual mention about the trouble they made on our road to achieve Manifest Destiny. There was the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age and people got tired of working all the time in dangerous conditions, so then there were some strikes or whatever and now we have weekends. We even allowed former slaves and women to vote: good job, America!
Then there was WWI, which got botched somehow so we had to do WWII. Hitler was bad and we beat his ass, and we also locked up Japanese Americans but that belongs in our blooper reel and we were sorry for that. Later. Kind of. Then it turned out maybe all the problems of racial inequality actually weren’t solved by the Civil War, so we had the Civil Rights movement and then things were basically fine.
Then came Vietnam and some stuff about communism, a hand wave through the later decades of the 20th century, then the War on Terror, the Great Recession, and now here we are in 2023, paying taxes to put more money into our military than most other developed nations combined because, you know...we love imperialism and foreign wars when we’re doing it, but shame on 18th century England for doing the same. Those assholes. Anyway, the best storytelling always comes full circle without beating you over the head with the symbolism and irony.
And that is how U.S. history was taught to many modern inheritors of this great experiment in democracy even before the culture wars got involved and people clutched their pearls over equity, diversity, and inclusion training, critical race theory, and the 1619 Project. But whatever you think about telling kids that most of the founding fathers owned slaves or that maybe Jim Crow didn’t end as much as it was transformed into the industrial prison complex, consider the inevitable fate of the Covid-19 pandemic in our history books.
It seems strange to think of events from three years ago as history, because we were there. It feels almost like a foregone conclusion that decades from now, chroniclers will reflect on the start of the 2020s as a time the nation, no, the world, was blindsided by an unseen enemy but how we all came together to fight back. They’ll tell about how science raced to develop treatments and vaccines in record time. There might even be pictures of the parades for healthcare workers and people singing to each other from NYC balconies.
But the stories about people who didn’t believe it was real, even as they gasped their last breaths in hospital beds, will disappear. So will the stories of the abuse frontline workers faced every day just for asking people to wear a mask. The stories about hoarding toilet paper and hand sanitizer and affordable housing and those who sold it at exorbitant markups will fade into the background, as will the reality that millions of people refused the very vaccines that the history books will tout as marvels of modern medicine and the American can-do spirit.
U.S. history books might note how more than 1 million Americans ultimately died—no mention about all the lives that were maimed by long Covid or the loss of a parent, partner, or breadwinner—but as Stalin once said, one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. 9/11 was a tragedy that killed 3,000 people and permanently altered the social and political landscape. To this day, I still can’t board a plane without taking off my shoes. But when that many were dying every day during some of the pandemic’s peaks, we had other people demanding we re-open restaurants and movie theaters and concerts because “we can’t live in fear.” The uglier parts will inevitably get left out of our story because they aren’t conducive to national pride.
I’ve learned a lot of things about American history since leaving school. It broke my heart to learn just how many Americans in the 1930s thought Hitler made some good points about Jews. To learn Lincoln wasn’t really opposed to slavery so much as he was the expansion of it. To learn just how pervasive lynching was in the American south or how relentlessly coordinated the genocide of the Native Americans was for more than a century. And I have a feeling that around the time I’m ready to breathe my last, I’ll hear young people insisting that while the pandemic was terrible, it was a unifying, equalizing force that brought out the best in us.
Never mind it only brought out the best in some of us. It brought out the worst in just as many others. Because to tell the story of everyone who resisted every single measure to slow or stop the pandemic with the dedication and ferocity of suicide bombers takes the “we’re all in this together” version of events and turns it into a disjointed narrative. That isn’t good storytelling. That isn’t good history worthy of an American classroom.