Today in Germany, school children learn their history in exhaustive detail. They learn not to be personally ashamed, but to be eternally vigilant, part of a solution to ensuring such a racist nightmare never returns to their land.

Children visit the sites of concentration camps, read personal stories written by and about the victims. They examined several theoretical turning points where things could have gone differently had the German people chosen differently.

Meanwhile, here in the United States, people strenuously object to children learning about the true racist history of our nation.

And rather than visiting Southern plantations to learn about the horrors of slavery, people visit them to get married in some kind of romantic glory.

People who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it, the saying goes. I wonder how much more that applies to people who refuse to know their history?