Letter: Survival dependent on making alternative histories
Making meaning of history is always an active process. I'm intrigued by the way this axiom has been materialized in The Chronicle's pages the past few days. For example, the headline "Students criticize 'terrorist' speaker" makes meaning very differently than a possible alternative like "Students seek to censor what you can learn at Duke." Jenny Neidermeyer's comparison of 1939 and 2003 in a column also seems apt, but I read the analogy in a directly opposite way. Massive unprovoked attacks on a sovereign nation, killing soldiers and civilians alike, were carried out by Germany against Poland and Austria and by Japan. These attacks were used to justify the use of weapons of mass destruction - firebombing and nuclear bombs - against these aggressors by the United States. I don't know how the SAT would grade my analogic thinking, but it seems vital to the survival of life on earth to actively make alternative histories to these.