I was on my way to work the other day. I was tuned in to the BBN radio station and heard a preacher tell a joke. A preacher was in the pulpit preaching his sermon. He noticed all through the sermon that a lady kept staring directly at him.
When the service ended, the lady marched up to the preacher and said, “There are frayed strings on your bow tie and they have been driving me crazy all through your sermon. Your attire is offensive to me!”
Somehow scissors were produced, and the preacher let the woman trim the frayed strings on his tie. When she finished, the preacher asked, “Are you satisfied with how it looks now?”
The woman replied that the preacher’s appearance was now satisfactory to her. The preacher took the scissors from the lady and said, “Now, I need for you to open your mouth. You see, your tongue is very offensive to me.”
Everything offends someone. Everyone is offended by something at some time. I consider it a true measure of social grace if you can tolerate my offences, and I can tolerate yours, and we can be friends, or at the very least tolerant of each other.
Many people are offended by past events in history. I remember Preacher Joe McCoy once preaching when he was pastor of the First Baptist Church of Maynardville. He was talking about the Hatfield-McCoy feud. He made the statement, “I don’t know who stole that pig!”
The entire point of studying history is to learn from the mistakes of the past. If repeating the mistakes of the past can be avoided, the future will be positively affected by present events. If it could be remembered who originally stole that pig, and what tree he was hung from, possibly no pigs would be stolen in the future.
Removing stories from history books just because some people find them offensive does not change the past. Additionally, it increases the possibility that the same or similar tragic events will be repeated.
Take, for example, events in my own life. Are there things in my past that I wish had never happened? Sure. Are there decisions I made that I wish I had not made? There are. Are there relationships with others that have been compromised that I wish could be restored? Indeed there are. Can I go back in time and fix any of these things? No. Does pretending that these things never happened mean they magically disappear? It does not.
And that is my own personal life. If I can’t even hope to change my personal past, how can I change the national history of past events? I can’t.
Every history book can be rewritten, the names of every place changed, every statue destroyed, but the fact that people and events existed and played a role in how we got to where we are today cannot be changed.
I’m sure many of us have pondered how the world would be different if certain things, events or people had not existed. One of the classic movies, It’s a Wonderful Life, pondered this. George Bailey found out that even though he was feeling that his life had been a failure, once given the ability to see what his town would have been like had he never lived, he learned that things would have been far worse without his ever having existed.
In summation of this soapbox, if you are unhappy with the past, do your part to make the future better and brighter. The past cannot be changed, and it is a waste of time and effort to try. And, as Forrest Gump said, “That’s all I have to say about that.”
As I write this, it is the beginning of the first weekend of fall 2021. It promises to be a beautiful weekend. I always think on days like this of Miss Eileen Monroe, former English teacher at Horace Maynard High School, and a wonderful poem she required her students to memorize. I leave you with that poem and best wishes for a beautiful, peaceful fall season.

“October’s Bright Blue Weather”

O SUNS and skies and clouds of June,
And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
October’s bright blue weather;

When loud the bumble-bee makes haste,
Belated, thriftless vagrant,
And Golden-Rod is dying fast,
And lanes with grapes are fragrant;

When Gentians roll their fringes tight
To save them for the morning,
And chestnuts fall from satin burrs
Without a sound of warning;

When on the ground red apples lie
In piles like jewels shining,
And redder still on old stone walls
Are leaves of woodbine twining;

When all the lovely wayside things
Their white-winged seeds are sowing,
And in the fields, still green and fair,
Late aftermaths are growing;

When springs run low, and on the brooks,
In idle golden freighting,
Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush
Of woods, for winter waiting;

When comrades seek sweet country haunts,
By twos and twos together,
And count like misers, hour by hour,
October’s bright blue weather.

O suns and skies and flowers of June,
Count all your boasts together,
Love loveth best of all the year
October’s bright blue weather.

Helen Hunt Jackson

(Source: https://thepoetryplace.wordpress.com/2010/10/29/octobers-bright-blue-we… Retrieved September 24, 2021)