Until I read it a second time.
I have had it happen many times throughout my life that I read a fanfic story -- or see a movie, or documentary -- and I enjoy it very much. I might gushingly tell other people about it. Then, after a certain amount of time, I read it again and it's just an ordinary story. Whatever I thought was particularly wonderful about it now doesn't seem to apply.
Of course, that also happens in the other direction -- upon first seeing or viewing something, it's nothing special. And then when taking it in at a later time, suddenly it's meaningful or particularly enjoyable.
That story or other media didn't change from the first reading to the second. It still has all the same words and dialogue. What changed was my perception. I was a different person during the second reading than I was during the first.
This is why I don't believe in good or bad, or right or wrong. Perspective is always fluid, because the perceiver is always in a state of change.
Right now, there's a lot of hoopla going on about removing statues from parks and other public places that have told the story of American history. For those of us old enough to have grown up being told in school, "Columbus discovered America" (as though that gigantic landmass didn't exist before Columbus perceived it), it's rather jolting to confront the idea that now the Story of How American Came to Be is going to change -- more than it already has in my lifetime.
I have been slowly reading the robots and Foundations series of short stories and novels by Isaac Asimov. As of the first Foundation book, the series covers about 12,000 years of galactic history, which started with the robot series beginning in the 21st century; ie, pretty much what is now modern times. After 12,000 years, millions of planets have human populations. Of course, each planet developed in its own way and has its own culture. Despite how much easier it is in that future to maintain information, most planets only know their own history. It's merely legend that all humans originated from a single planet. And since that legend is so old and irrelevant, most citizens of all those planets don't care, as there's no reason why they should.
I often enjoy watching historical documentaries and such. I always find them interesting. But frankly, I don't believe that any history is "true" in the purest sense. People can't remember the exact conversation that took place five minutes ago, let alone decades later when someone asks them to recall a dramatic moment before they die. Often, witnesses to something dramatic will say, "I remember it like it was yesterday", but they don't. They aren't the same person they were yesterday, so their telling is going to have a different perspective than if they'd told it two months ago, or a year ago, or five years ago, or fifty years ago. "Accurate" history is as fluid as the perceivers of it.
There will come a time, eons in the future (or maybe faster than that), when the story of How America Came to Be will be lost, because nobody will care anymore. Just like cavemen surely had their own stories of their histories that meant a lot to them, but nobody now knows what those stories were.
So, in a sense, all the fuss over statues and telling "the real, full story" of American history is irrelevant in the long run. But it matters now to a lot of people, and all we have is the now.
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