One good thing…

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

There have been an untold number of tragic events throughout human history. There’s no denying that. The irony is that out of many tragedies there can often come some good. For a fairly recent example, I can recall how we all reacted in horror to the events of Sept. 11, 2001. But I can also recall how in the immediate aftermath, we all seemed to come together, united as Americans, and for a while, there were more people in church, more American flags on display and a general rise in patriotism. So, that was one good thing.

And you’ll see that sort of idea again and again as you look down through history. You sort of have to be careful when you start a sentence with “One good thing about …” and then go into some dark chapter of our lives. I think about how looking through the recent lens of history has led us to reexamine

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Christopher Columbus, for example. While most of us were taught that Columbus discovered the Americas, brought on an age of exploration and discovery and connected the Old World to the New World, we were largely kept ignorant to his mistreatment of the indigenous people he encountered, how the arrival of Europeans led to the obliteration of Native Americans and how the “discovery” of America snowballed into a series of terrible events.

Sure all of that is true, but one good thing about the beginning of what would become known as The Columbian Exchange is that is led to a cross-ocean exchange of goods and ideas and products that ultimately benefitted the whole world. Imagine the famines in Ireland in the 1800s if potatoes had not made their way to Europe from America. What impact would malaria have had in Africa if quinine had not been discovered in Mexico. We all imagine Native Americans on horseback, but there were no horses in America until Spanish explorers brought them over.

That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about.

No one wants to hear “One good thing about slavery …” there’s absolutely no denying that this nation was built in large part on the labor of enslaved Africans. It its fragile early years, it was slave labor that allowed the young nation to feed its armies, clothe its people, compete in the international markets. It’s a horrible, horrible thing to enslave another person but there’s no denying that it was a key part of the U.S. emerging as a global power in the 1800s.

And if nothing else, we can always point to slavery as justification for why we need to have laws even today that aim to ensure that no one is treated as a second-class citizen, regardless of race, gender, religion, etc.

Saying “One good thing about the Holocaust …” is likely to start a fight if you say it in the wrong place, but it is an absolute fact that Jews fleeing the Nazi death camps came to America. Many of them were well-educated scientists and mathematicians who went on to make vital contributions to medicine and science and even worked on the atomic bomb that led to the end of World War II. What if Hitler had put those scientists to work building the A-bomb for Germany? It’s just a fascinating part of the human experience that we can find good in the midst of tragedy.

Which sort of leads us to where we are today. No matter if your guy won or your gal lost on Nov. 5, it’s over.

And now we have, at least in theory, to put aside partisan differences and work toward uniting our country and moving forward. Will that happen? Maybe, maybe not. But either way, in 2028, we’ll have a fresh, brand new batch of presidential candidates to consider.

And that’s one good thing …