Back in June, I volunteered for half a day at my local library’s used book sale. After my shift, I browsed around for myself. After all, what lover of books can pass by paperbacks for fifty cents and hardbacks for a dollar? I found several, and one was a 1964 paperback of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. I’d seen the movie version some years back, but I had never read the book. Every year, I try to read a few classics, so I picked it up. Two nights ago, I got down to it in my stack.

What immediately struck me, along with the excellent writing and characterization, were the words and phrases that so many today would consider politically incorrect, and rightfully so. However, in the extreme views of these times, we must be careful what we condemn from the past. “This book should be banned as racist!” I can hear some shouting in the streets. But we shouldn’t try to erase or deny the past. It was what it was. And Mitchell’s book is what it is an accurate description of what was acceptable at the time it was written.

Instead of rewriting or destroying history, we should teach it accurately—including all the things we did as a society that we now recognize as wrong thinking. Yes, history has been told in many ways that are no longer acceptable. Yes, many of the original thirteen colonies were begun as commercial investments by wealthy people in Europe to make a profit. Yes, slavery was essential to the economic development of cotton. What was “right” and accepted then, is now “wrong” in our eyes.

Can’t change that!

What we can change is how we mover forward, how we teach the next generation. Every Martin Luthor King Day that I taught kindergartners, I would read and explain to my young students what that holiday meant, using a picture book biography of that wonderful man and adding to it in my own words. I would tell them the facts in an age-appropriate way, emphasizing that was how it was then, and now we think differently. I would say to them something like, “You know, when I was your age, kids like you would not have been in the same classroom. You wouldn’t have been allowed to be friends with each other.” (And, yes, I’m old enough to remember those things.) I’d point to the variety of kids I had in that classroom—Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, who all played with each other in the room and on the playground. I’d say something like, “Aren’t you glad we’ve changed since then and we can all be friends?” And some years, they’d start hugging each other, glad to be friends with everyone now.

Too bad adults don’t act more like five-year-olds who, for the most part, are loving and accepting of each other. Maybe today’s society simply needs to start a huge hug fest of everyone around them, Republican, Democrat, Independent, Black, White, Brown, Red, the whole rainbow, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Tao, Buddhist … Remember what the Beatles, back in the 1960s, wrote in the song “Imagine”?

If you can “Imagine” that, please leave a message on this site, saying: Yes, I Imagine.