Our country has worked hard to overcome many of the sins of our
past and we have made amazing amounts of progress towards being
an inclusive society. However, the shadow of our past still
remains, and for many the shame is too much to bear. There is a
desire to hide the shame of our community to bury the fact that
we once were not perfect. In Moab, we like to forget that we
once hosted a Japanese American internment camp, that we fought
in bloody conflicts with native tribes, that greed and avarice
destroyed the lives of many our residents, and that, at one
time, we called a man named William by a nickname that is
derogatory. Why do we choose to remember these terrible things
we did? George Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the
past, are condemned to repeat it.” If we forget that we were
once cruel, that we once made mistakes could we make them again?
While Americans have made great leaps in civility in the past
100 years, we still find ourselves making many of the same
mistakes that our ancestors m