You can't be neutral.

I just finished watching You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, the biographical documentary about the life and ideas of Howard Zinn. It has inspired me to re-read A People's History of the United States... sometime very soon. My reading list has ballooned to a daunting number, so I might need to re-shuffle the order and move it closer to the top.

My first encounter with Howard Zinn was as a sophomore in high school. My US history teacher used A People's History as the basis for our entire year of instruction -- which in retrospect takes on more meaning for me than it did at the time. I was young enough not to understand that the picture of US history that my teacher was laying out for me was not the generally accepted standard in most textbooks. I may have had some grasp of the fact that it was the first time I was hearing a history that placed women, Black people, Indians, workers in the center of the picture.

But I am very thankful to my history teacher, and maybe to my own naivete. Because this understanding of history was laid as a foundation, and I didn't understand it to be "alternative." And the absences in many other versions of US history that I have encountered since then have seemed glaring and sometimes ridiculous. And dangerous, in that they deceive people into believing that the intentions and actions of US governments have always been honorable, which make it impossible for us to see the follies and abuses that are entirely too commonplace.

I was very sad to see that Roslyn Zinn passed away recently. This obituary describes her as the "unseen hand" in her husband's work, as I've noticed is often the case in such long marriages. They were married for more than sixty years.