“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” ~ Alvin Toffler
Journalism has often been referred to as “the first rough draft of history.” That implies several things: the story, when first written, is incomplete; rewrites and revisions will eventually be required, perhaps multiple times, as new information comes to light. That’s true for journalism, for our personal life stories, and it’s also true of the way we view history, remember history and share history.
As I navigate these days with my mom in hospice care, I’ve had more uninterrupted conversations with my dad than I ever remember having. (Triangulation is a potent dynamic in a household with two parents and one kid.) It upset my proverbial apple cart a little to learn that many of the “facts” I thought I knew about my paternal grandparents were actually my mother’s personal interpretation of events—her own rough draft of family history.
I have a dear friend who was told, and believed his whole life, that he was of Italian descent. It wasn’t a stretch to buy that story; he looks the part. And because he believed what he was told, he adopted the accompanying persona wholeheartedly, only to take one of those genealogy tests and find out he’s not Italian at all, just a common English-German blend.
What would be weird in those instances is if, for example, I continued to write my family narrative according to the admittedly biased interpretation I heard from my mother and failed to include the new information from my dad, who was actually there. Or if my friend ignored his DNA results and continued telling people he’s Italian. We’d think that was a little peculiar, right?
And yet we do it with history all the time.
Remember the story about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree and ‘fessing up to his crime? Sorry to burst your bubble, but that story is a myth. It was created after Washington’s death by a traveling minister and bookseller who wanted to sell a biography. The tale was later perpetuated by another minister, public speaker and writer who crafted his own version for the famous McGuffey Readers used to teach children for decades. It’s a great fictional parable about the value of honesty, but it isn’t a true story.
That means whether it’s Washington’s cherry tree, the river freezing from the bottom up, or the way we tell the story of the founding of the town of Meeker, we—if we are to be honest and responsible stewards of information—have to revise our interpretations and incorporate new information as it comes to light. And we’re required to do that again and again as additional evidence emerges.
And that’s hard, because we are emotionally invested in the stories we’ve heard our whole lives. We’ve bought them hook, line and sinker because someone we trusted and respected shared them with us, and changing those stories can feel like a betrayal.
But refusing to revise a narrative in the face of new information is an even worse kind of betrayal. It’s choosing a comfortable and familiar fiction over an uncomfortable truth. It’s valuing certainty over accuracy. And in the long run, it leaves us less informed, less honest, and less capable of learning, unlearning and relearning.
The first rough draft is rarely the final draft. History deserves revisions when the evidence demands them, and so do we.
