We can’t learn any lessons from our past if we allow it to be covered up — or we just allow ourselves to forget what happened.
— Tommy Oliver, Think, NBC News
What the city of Philadelphia did to the people in MOVE was simultaneously a big deal and not at all when I was growing up. I’d heard the term “MOVE,” I knew that there was some group and some bomb but that was really the extent of it; there was never much clarity. Even in Philly, people either didn’t know anything at all about this series of events or, if they did know something, they didn’t really understand it. Even there, it was just a broken narrative.
I think people don’t understand what the government is truly capable of, and people don’t want to understand. And so they forget these events. And when we forget our history, we are doomed to repeat them. And because we forgot, we didn’t see the lessons we could have learned and we didn’t apply that knowledge.