Every time I leave the country and come back and the more I find legitimate sources of news and information on the internet, I realize more and more how ignorant of history our media keeps us. In Wisconsin we are repeating the same mistake as we did in the eighties with moves to close down mental health institutions and turn care for those with mental illnesses over to community treatment without providing the funds for comprehensive medical, mental health care. It was called “reform” at the time but led to widespread homelessness and imprisonment of those with mental illnesses. Today’s headline in the local section of the newspaper reads: “Bill to reform mental health system advances”, a bill that would return control of Milwaukee Mental Health system over to the same persons who are responsible for its demise. They talk about tearing down the present mental health complex and selling the property but do not talk about where the money will come from for true medical mental health care.

Today I read an article in online news reporting page Common Dreams. It was called What the US Media Won’t Tell You About Ukraine. The article tells the story of the Ukraine and the how right after the US-European supported coup of the electoral government of Ukraine the rump government took advantage of President’s Yanukovich’s downfall to overturn the language law that gave the Russian language official status in regions where Russians comprise more than 10% of the population. Our media hardly mentioned it but Russians, learning from history, knew what it meant, “a brutal violation of ethnic minority rights,” Suffering the lost of the Russian language in history, like in Turkmenistan, a Central Asian dictatorship and former Soviet republic in Central Asia. It means the beginning of discrimination, lost of property, finances and exile for the Russian minority.

We learned that “Jim Crow” laws did not work in the USA yet we continue to find new “Jim Crow” ways like mass incarceration to discriminate and segregate people of color. We talk about how special and free the USA is yet we have the highest rate of incarceration per capita of any nation on earth. (See chart on right and larger version below.) History tells us that the more we imprison people the crime rate grows since imprisonment does not deal with the real cause of crime, lack of unemployment, education, opportunity and health care, great income diversity and discrimination, all things we can change in the environment, lest costly, to make it easier for people to be good and not commit crimes.

George Santayana said “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Our media makes it hard to learn from history.

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