Systemic societal issues that affect different nations and peoples arise out of an unwillingness to deal with an uncomfortable past, preventing the lessons of history from actually taking effect. America exists at an intersection between many different uncomfortable pasts, having faced circumstances and made choices as a country that some feel are better left for the corners of history that are rarely touched on.

At our roots, this nation was envisioned to be a city upon a hill; America was meant to serve as an example to the world of how democracy and an extension of individual rights to citizens would serve to provide for a more stable and better country that stood for something more than just a monarch. Our founding fathers believed that absolute power corrupts absolutely and in developing this nation they, through the lenses of their time, took a hard look at the lessons of history and tried to learn from them.

This nation exists today because they saw a problem and set about to fix it, not by repeating the same mistakes that led to the same problems they were trying to fix but by really addressing the root of those problems. Today is no different. Today we are plagued with issues that have corroded elements of this nation that will eventually lead to a degradation of the entire system. Racism, prejudice, and bigotry are not and will never be issues that lie solely in the past and we as a collective society will always face it and yet there are parts of this nation that don’t see it.

Refusing to acknowledge the issue doesn’t make it go away; arguing that it’s not an issue in the first place doesn’t erase the pain it has caused to those who have been irreversibly affected. Individuals don’t get to decide when they’ve hurt another; they only get to decide how they deal with that hurt, that injustice and large swaths of this nation have chosen apathy or to feign ignorance. We cannot move on from a history that we have not already taken ownership of; we cannot get over the past when the past continues to haunt the present.

Charlottesville is just another example of this need to remember our past and the context in which we exist in the present. White supremacy has always existed in this nation but many people are still surprised that it has the vociferousness and the cruelty to do what it did over the course of two days, culminating in the terrorist attack that took the life of one activist and injured nineteen more.

What started as a protest organized by white supremacists to prevent the tearing down of a Robert E. Lee statue, something that stands not as a memorial of a cruel aspect of our shared history but stands honoring a man who helped keep that cruelty alive, quickly turned violent as non-violent students at UVA stood near the statue and held signs counter-protesting. While police stood by doing little, people were beaten and robbed of their humanity for simply standing up to a racist creed perpetrated by insecure and atrocious men and women that long to bring back an America I hope few would ever truly support.

Over the course of the past few days people have had the chance to see that the past they think we have left far behind is still echoing today; the white supremacy and racism thought to have been resigned to the past will still rear its ugly head even in 2017.

The issue with the response to this event, the hash tags and the statements saying that Charlottesville isn’t us, is that it ignores our past; we might not be the culmination of Charlottesville all the time but we have been many times before and we’re bound to be it again. Many Americans have chosen to be couch-seat activists, sharing their disbelief and horror at public displays of bigotry yet do little to actually prevent it from happening again. Many benefit from a privilege in society; they don’t even realize they have yet chosen not to listen to individuals who show that they do have that privilege.

I don't have to wake up each day and worry about being the victim of a white supremacist who tries attacking me or being the subject of discrimination in my normal life or my professional career. Therein lies the privilege, or at least a small part of the greater concept of white privilege in this society: I live my life without that fear, without ever having to worry about being the victim of discrimination and bigotry because of the color of my skin.

Spending a life surrounded by racism and its human cost is real to many people and to deny it exists, to deny its effect on individuals in this nation is to be part of the problem; it fuels the rhetoric and the growth of movements like the alt-right who try to turn people against each other based on issues like acknowledging privilege and allows them to expand at the edges of society without any resistance because people bristle at an attempt to illustrate how they have benefited from implicit and explicit forms of racism within our country even if they’re not the ones who are actually racist.

People shove their heads in the sand to it all because the concept of white privilege forces them to confront the racism that has existed for the entirety of this country’s existence and wonder if their place in society is truly their own or the result of society’s perceptual differences in judging the merits of an individual because of things like race. Those who refuse to acknowledge their role in the spread of extremism, who think that condemning a group filled with hate from the keyboard of a computer actually ends that hate, will only continue to help spread that hate through their passiveness.

People complain and stoke righteous outrage at US History curriculum that acknowledges the mistakes of our past, making something as seemingly universally accepted as the fact that our nation was built in part by bigotry, that racism was a cornerstone and a foundational element of our march westward, into a partisan issue that can somehow boil down the legitimacy of a part of our history to how a person voted.

Some want the bad to be balanced out by the good but if our history is dominated by bad or morally ambiguous events then it means forgetting elements of our past that should be addressed. Our history is our history whether we like it or not and acknowledging that atrocities were committed and that there were times where our nation did not come anywhere close to being that city on a hill doesn’t make us worse, it makes us better.

To address the negative elements of our past doesn’t mean to forget the good; history is made not by gods but by humans, imperfect and malleable as we are, who are consumed by both right and wrong.

Some of the greatest individuals of our past contributed to parts of our history that we tend to overlook but highlighting those elements does not erase the good that was accomplished. Instead it brings our successes, the elements of our country that we uphold as great, into perspective and show how long, how hard, and of the human cost that the fight has been to get to where we are today; this alone should make anyone appreciate those same successes all the more.

Today’s movements to bring attention to the injustice we still face are part of this recognition of our past; without these, the movements like BLM, the institutions that have existed for years as nothing more than an extension of systemic racism will continue to exist as such. Without a knowledge of our past we cannot move forward and hold our current institutions accountable for their injustices. When we forget the lessons of the past we condemn ourselves to an endless cycle of learning and relearning these lessons.

Today we are at a crossroads where we can choose to move forward, promoting productive dialogue to right the wrongs of the past and present, or we can continue to discount and disregard the legitimate cries for reform and justice, resigning ourselves and our era to another part of our history that future generations will disown as a mistake of the past that couldn’t possibly be repeated but ultimately will.

A cornerstone of our nation was the idea that civic virtue would be the preserving force for this nation at its darkest moments, that an informed and engaged public would be able to right the wrongs of the government before these problems threatened the continued existence of that government. If we hope to cultivate that civic virtue we as a nation must acknowledge, own, and address our past, however complicated it might be. It is only by doing this that we can ever begin to move forward. Combating racism and bigotry is an endless fight that cannot be won in perpetuity; each generation must push back against new forms of hate that always manifests itself regardless of “how far we’ve come”.

Nevertheless, while passivity contributes to a problem just as a sin of omission is still a sin, our state of affairs and the state of ethics among our elected representatives have contributed to this problem as well. Serving as a representative in the government is a service that goes beyond a paycheck, beyond the day to day duties that involve legislation; being a representative means serving as a member of the public who is supposed to be that moral voice among a sea of hate, a leader among others who stands for something more in the world.

They have a moral and an ethical responsibility to serve with respect and honor and be a model for civility, standing at the forefront of the fight to protect against bigotry. They don’t just represent one demographic or voting group in their district or state, they represent everyone and regardless of their political affiliation they must do their due diligence to them.

Politicians, especially members of the GOP, have betrayed their constituents, betrayed their purpose as representatives, and contributed to the decline of this nation and the rise of overtly hateful rhetoric in modern politics. They manipulate the legitimate fears and concerns of their voters in an attempt to consolidate and shore up support of their key demographics so that their first term turns into their second, third, fourth, and fifth terms all the while doing virtually nothing to actually address those concerns, instead playing fellow neighbor off of neighbor and furthering the rise of needless tensions.

The idea of race is a potent and influential weapon used in politics and when combined with fear we get events like Charlottesville that build up and eventually explode into violence.

The past presidential election only served to reinforce the power of dog whistling and fear in politics, tightening the grip that it has on our understanding of policy issues within America. Reducing an argument down to nothing more than a coded “us vs. them” attack on entire groups of people not only distracts the public from an actual discussion of ideas, but also only reinforces and legitimizes hate.

Statements like immigrants steal jobs and bring crime, affirmative action is reverse racism and unfairly disadvantages white men, strengthening law and order, entire elections are rigged are all thinly veiled dog whistling used to attract white supremacists and incite fear into average white voters who are convinced that only that politician can actually protect them, as if they needed protecting from the falsely created “other” in the first place.

This fear, this hateful rhetoric, legitimizes fringe groups and gives them a voice in government and policy that should never be allowed to take root in our nation. Republicans have walked a fine line over the past few decades in alluring these extremists to their party, sowing seeds of discontent and building entire platforms based on little else but opposition, and the events of the past weekend are the horrors they must reap.

Citing Donald Trump, leaders of the white supremacist riot like David Duke said that they were there to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump and take back the nation that they think belongs to them. Words and rhetoric have consequences; Charlottesville, the countless who were injured and the three who died, is part of that consequence. Was it worth it President Donald Trump?

We cannot continue to let politicians dangerously flirt with this bigotry, giving it a voice and a home in positions of influence and power both in society and in our government. Rather than outright support, we live in a time where dog whistling and coded language have become the new tool to enable and legitimize these movements of hate by politicians who are concerned with nothing more than reelection.

There will never be a moment where a portion of “Americans” will not become susceptible to radicalization, where individuals who feel neglected and abandoned find a voice that leads them down a path of bigotry and hate rather than a path that leads to a positive impact on the world around them. Hate is never the voice of reason and it is the job of everyone to recognize that it has no place in this country or this society, making a conscious choice to help prevent the spread of hate in their communities and the country as a whole rather than choosing apathy. Without this, without real action, Charlottesville will only be a new beginning of the resurgence of an old reality in politics.