Key To The Present is in the Past by Amanda

Key To The Present is in the Past by Amanda - April 2013 Scholarship Essay

Growing up, I had a real affinity for school. I enjoyed almost every aspect of it, from the comraderie of friends and peers to the challenge of academics. English, Spanish and the social sciences were particular areas where I really managed to flourish under but it was the classes that I took that dealt with history that I found a real passion for. A lot of people think of history as just memorizing dates and having to read the boring stories of a bunch of old dead people but it's so much more than that. To me, the history always provided a way forward - you could see patterns in the past that continued in the future (albeit, slightly modified as progress tends to do). Take for instance civil rights. All throughout history, there have been movements started by people who have, at some point in time, been denied basic rights that some parts of our society have always been granted - women have created movements throughout history to demand equal representation in government and the right to live in society equal to men (and within the women's rights movement, you have women of various ethnic backgrounds fighting for equality within their own local sphere). Minority groups have started various movements - Asian-Americans fighting for the right to immigrate to the United States for decades and equal representation within the law, African Americans fighting for the right to be recgonized as citizens and being able to use those rights to push for more and better oprotunities so that they could live the American Dream just as much as anyone else. History allows us to learn from the mistakes not only that civil right's groups have made but also those groups that would use their power and privileage to disenfranchise individiuals based on superficial differences. You can see what sort of periods in history lead to particular moments of extreme discrimination and how people handled those moments in order to prevent them from happening again once they over came them. The LGBTQ+ movement that we've experienced within the last 40 years or so is a great example of leaders of those particular movements learning from the past in order to achieve the equal rights that they, as citizens and basic human beings, are entitled to from a common sense and legal stand point. The only way to advance as a society is to understand where we came from - without knowing that, you really can't understand where you are going or how to get there.