Thank You Ebony!

[Chickadilly5 at aol.com]

<<Pausing and looking around ... >>

Delurking ... 

Ebony I just want to say how impressed I was with your essay.  I have printed 
it out and plan to share it with some friends of mine this afternoon, 
hopefully to promote some discussion among us.  I've read that book you 
mentioned, "Lies my teacher told me" a few years back and found it both 
fascinating and disturbing.  An example of how little people know about 
history: about four years ago I worked at a Borders Books in San Diego and we 
had a scheduled book signing with Rosa Parks.  We advertised this quite 
heavily and many of us book sellers (the music sellers too, to be honest) 
were really excited and looking forward to it.  Unfortunately it was canceled 
due to Ms. Parks poor health and many of us were disappointed.  What 
disturbed me the most was how many people came to me and asked me who she was 
and why were promoting it!  It blew me away that people could not know how 
important she was.  Another example, not really related to race but equally 
mind blowing (to me anyway) was when a girl came to ask me if we had a book 
entitled, "At dawn we slept."  This is a rather famous book about the bombing 
of Pearl Harbor.  I told her I knew we had it in stock (I had just shelved it 
that morning) and that she could find it in the history section under World 
War 2.  She looked at me blankly and asked why it was put there.  I explained 
it was about Pearl Harbor and her response was, "Ohhhh!  Ok, just 'cuz I saw 
that in some movie and thought it was made up for the movie."  I just stood 
there and in my shock couldn't think of anything to say in response. 

You're so right when you say if people knew the truth about history; not just 
fractions of the stories, they would find it all the more interesting!

Anyway, enough rambling ... I just wanted to thank you for that well thought 
out essay and I will try and write to you directly with my friends comments. 
:-) 

Lea 


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