My niece had a cupcake cake made of white cake. I made a comment about being surprised it wasn't chocolate which has always been her favorite. She said she decided not to like chocolate. I didn't know you could decide something like that

After the party I took her to her Powder Puff practice and she told me some stuff about her school. Since she went to Honduras on her mission trip she said she thinks school is a priviledge. After seeing how most of the people she met had only a 3rd grade education, if that, she realizes that their lack of education keeps them poor and she's lucky to have the opportunity to learn. It's a very good thing that she is thinking that way.

However, I wonder about some of the stuff she tells me she is learning. She says they learned how aliens helped build the pyramids. She also doesn't believe that man made it to the moon - that is was a hoax. Next thing I know she will tell me the holocaust didn't happen.

I think there is a pattern in our culture anymore that puts down man's achievments. We are portrayed as greedy, war-mongoring, environment destroying, and brutal as a species. We are rarely given credit for the amazing accomplishments mankind has made over the centuries. For example with the pyramids, the story of aliens helping build them is put out there because man couldn't have possibly done something so amazing by himself, he had to have had help. Like back in the 1800's when explorers found fantastic ruins in Africa, they never gave local people credit for building them, it always had to be some lost white tribe who must have done these marvelous things.

When they teach about the founding founders they seem to emphasize their personal flaws rather than emphasizing the truly revolutionary things they accomplished. They created an entirely new country with a system to make men free to grow, to be rich, to worship and to be free from government abuses. Most of the countries in the world still don't have these privileges. In America we have the right and opportunity to develop from having nothing to being multi-millionaires just through our own efforts. The founders gave us the system for doing that. Yet we are told they were slave owners and philanderers etc. They were, but this wasn't immoral by the standard of their times. And I think the things they accomplished should be emphasized more than the other parts.

We don't seem to want to give credit to man for being great. We always try to find the flaw in a person, and everyone has flaws, and emphasize that to demphasize the great things people do. For example, my sister loved Rock Hudson movies, until she found out he was gay, then she hated them. The movies didn't change, the acting didn't change, just her perception of the actor. What a stupid reason to decide not to like something. But we seem to do it all the time with great historical figures.

Christopher Columbus was a hero when I was growing up. Now he's portrayed as a genocidal conqueror. What he did was heroic. He set out across an ocean in flimsy boats to find a new path to China. He didn't set out to bring disease to a group of people, he didn't set out to conquer a land, he set out to discover something new. That was very brave considering the conditions of the time. But we can't give him credit for that, because of the results.

I don't mind the kids learning both sides, but put the emphasize on the achievements, on the ideas, on the mores of the time in which the people lived. Judging someone from hundreds of years ago based on modern values is wrong. And dismissing their accomplishments based on modern values of their personalities is also wrong.

We should celebrate the greatest of human beings instead of constantly looking to tear them down. I don't know what schools expect to achieve by demphasizing man's greatness.

I finished reading the library book Silent Truth by Sherrilyn Kenyon and Diana Love. Mystery/Romance - pretty good. Not as good as her Dark Hunter series.