Only a self-confident and forthright people teach history like it happened judging historical events by the moral standards of the present rather than the backward morality of the past. 40 years ago, Americans rewrote how the west was won: they killed the injuns and took their land. The truth about yourself doesn't only make you free, it makes you strong. If you can face it, you can face down anything because we are our own worst enemies.

The Texas Education Service Center wants the Boston Tea Party story retold for what it was. Legend has it a bunch of Bostonians demanding no tax on tea w/o representation in parliament threw a cargo of tea into Boston harbor.

Telling the story that way, Texan teachers asked kids if the Boston Tea Party was an act of terrorism or patriotism. Actually it was vandalism. It didn't even qualify as tax evasion, the tea was not theirs to be taxed. Tax evasion was what Henry David Thoreau committed when he would not pay taxes to pay for his country's invasion of Mexico.

The Texas Education Service was set up to correct Southern American distortions of history such as that the civil rights movement was a black picnic that unfairly excluded the Ku Klux Klan because there was no room in the tour bus for burning crosses or that black slavery was migrant labor with free passage but in shackles.

Here we take the opposite extreme. Instead of debunking heroes, we find them where they don't exist, thereby degrading heroism. People undergo hardship abroad for family back home; that does not make them heroes, it makes them victims.

Making everyone a hero makes no one a hero. You work abroad, you are a hero; you work at home, you are a hero; you wait for a handout and you are classified as self-employed.

Keep well.