This week I finished:

A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn: This book came out swinging, on Columbus, and kept on punching. In my opinion, every American would benefit from reading this book.

If you believe government should solve social problems, this book will bring depth and history to help you understand your cause. If you believe government shouldn’t get into an individual’s business, you’ll see how much people who claimed to espouse such beliefs did the opposite.

I knew people who promoted hierarchy enforced it through violence, thereby controlling the political system through non-democratic means. This book revealed how much, and how much through machine guns, murder, and more.

I also didn’t realize how much my history education growing up left out from the view of people at the bottom of dominance hierarchies. I kind of knew a lot of it but not this level of detail or the underlying patterns. This book was one-sided too, though he didn’t claim otherwise.

I think the book would have benefited from trying to see things from the view of people at the top of dominance hierarchies: were they just evil and out for themselves? He seemed to treat people as belonging to different classes as inherent personal traits. Or were they no more or less human than anyone else? If not, what led them to become different? If so, why did they behave differently despite sharing the same emotional system? I think Zinn may then have shown more empathy and compassion. More importantly, I think he would have understood the situation better and therefore come up with more effective solutions.

I consider this book one of the most important I’ve read on understanding this nation’s political history and current situation. That said, like every leftist book I’ve read lately, it doesn’t understand racism. It just says Europeans and whites do it and everyone else is a victim of it. He traces it to Portuguese and Spanish explorers, but not why they came to be that way, as if it was just a property of Europeans or white people. He does talk about how when whites and blacks could interact without outside forces separating them, they cooperated, but it seemed more to condemn the outside forces for causing their differences and, of course, the outside forces were Europeans and whites.

I can’t wait until I get to write my book on race.

• ← Sustainability connecting me to nature: wonderful overall but challenging in the winter
• Ozempic: A drug that achieves what sustainability does, but sustainability doesn’t trade one dependence for another →