Going forward? We probably shouldn't. Unfortunately, there's no way to go back to 2008 and build a rival dataset. Not without an elaborate space mirror/FTL craf

Going forward? We probably shouldn't. Unfortunately, there's no way to go back to 2008 and build a rival dataset. Not without an elaborate space mirror/FTL craft/telescope set-up, at least. As to your question, if I may wax poetic: the history of America (the nation) is short and filled with episodes its residents would like to forget. That brevity makes those events (and the desire to bury them) all the more poignant. As way of an example, which I only recently learned about: Why is much of the East Coast forested? It's not because we didn't clear cut hundreds of thousands of acres of old-growth timber to use for slave-worked farmland which was scarred by the over-planting of cash crops, apparently. I'm sure that's not the whole story, but I imagine that it's part of it. It's so much easier to push New Thing if people don't know what Old Thing is being demolished to make way for it.