Advancement vs Tradition

"People ruled over others not because they were better people but because they had better guns...."  - Adichie

It seems like this year, we've been focusing a lot on how what we know can be changed by the 'winners', the last man standing, in both history as well as english class. Society and life in general revolves around the idea that the one who has most firepower will end up victorious. For example, in legal disputes, the winner of a case isn't necessarily the one who's correct. The winner is most often the person who can hire the better lawyer. In this example, the figurative firepower is money, because whoever spends the most ends up victorious. Also, like many others have said (and like we learned in history), the winner of the war is granted the ability to mold history to their liking. In these cases, literal firepower determines the winner (or sometimes political power), and the losing side is usually marginalized and neglected. The most obvious example of this (for all of us in America) is shown by the so-called "Indians" who were victims of Columbus' genocide and were even forced to discard their original cultures and identities.

Throughout the course of this year, I've come to realize just how lucky I am to be born into the "winning side". To avoid repeating the mistakes of our predecessors, I think that it is our responsibility to try to keep the "losing sides'" cultures and histories alive, even if they don't always portray a a picturesque image of Americans. Also, I think the descendants of the "losing side" also have an obligation to keep the memory of their ancestors alive, much like the way Grace (or Afamefuna) does in "The Headstrong Historian". While I'm all for advancement, every culture deserves a headstrong historian to keep old traditions from becoming forgotten forever.