Politics & Power Quote by Jerry Costello

There is an accusation hiding in Costello's civics-club cadence: if "future generations" don't know what happened, it's because someone decided they shouldn't. The line frames historical memory as a contested public utility, not an inert archive. "Indifference" names the softer failure - the shrug that lets atrocities, injustices, or hard-won reforms fade into trivia. "Distortions of history" points at the sharper threat: organized forgetting, political mythmaking, the kind of selective storytelling that turns public education and commemorations into a battlefield.

Costello's phrasing does two strategic things. First, it binds moral authority to institutional power. "Members of Congress and people of conscience" collapses role and virtue, implying that legislative responsibility is not just procedural but ethical. That's a subtle pressure tactic: to disagree is to risk sounding indifferent or unconcerned. Second, it shifts the stakes forward. By invoking "future generations", he sidesteps partisan details and asks listeners to imagine their legacy - a classic political move that converts policy debates into a referendum on national character.

The context is a familiar late-20th/early-21st century American struggle: whose version of the past gets certified through textbooks, hearings, memorials, and official resolutions. Costello is signaling that history isn't merely "taught"; it's administered. The intent is less to settle an argument about the past than to legitimize action in the present - investigations, funding, commemorations, curricular standards - under the banner of moral upkeep.