One Side of History

If there’s one thing that writing history has taught me, it’s that it really doesn’t matter which side of the line you’re standing on in a fight.  Everybody’s a bad guy because they are willing to do anything to survive.

Or at least, that’s what I’m telling myself today. Yesterday I quietly sided with the rebels, but today the police were standing between my daughter and the rebels.  Not that she cared about what the rebels want. She’s not interested in things that happened before she was born, so the why of the protests isn’t something she notices.

I told her to stay out of it. I told her she shouldn’t be taking sides when she didn’t understand. It’s not really legal for me to tell her what I remember, though, so I fell silent when she shrugged and said she was going down there anyway. She said she didn’t see why those idiots should change her plans for the day. I thought back to the way I had distanced myself from similar “idiots” in the past, and found I was unable to object without undoing decades of careful phrasing of events.

The bottom line is that I agree with the idiots getting beaten in the streets, but I’ll fully support crushing them to keep my daughter safe. They’d crush me if they could.