<Lack of cultural memory is like having no medical records of your family. Didn't somebody else have this illness, and what was the outcome? Don't know? Too bad: we'll have to learn it all over again, and use the guinea pigs.

This would be true, of course, except for the unpleasant fact that much of what was learned by our ancestors was wrong, useless, or downright dangerous.

How many times has the family patriarch sat everyone down and said, "here's the mistakes my father made, the prejudices he had that we must ignore, the hatreds he had that we no longer need."

Now, how many times has the family patriarch sat everyone down and said, "Here's why the Jews ruined Germany for the rest of us."

Unfortunately there tends to be a lot of the latter, and not much of the former. Save the nice recipes, the old photos, the diaries, the colorful clothing. Remember the mistakes. Leave the rest of the old country behind. Most of it was very sick, from thousands of years of illness, and what little we brought over with us when we came here has caused enough trouble already.

The whole point of coming to America was to leave all that behind and get a fresh start.

Cultures evolve, if people let them, leaving old stuff behind and picking up new stuff that works. If you look at the trouble spots of the world, a vast majority of them are the result of patterns of behavior that were appropriate--or at least useful--a thousand years ago. They just don't work any more.

The beauty and strength of American culture is that within the larger framework of the values of individual rights and freedom, it is an amalgam of many different cultures, having picked the useful parts from all over the world to take into the future, and left much (not all) of the poisonous trash behind.