Our nation’s founders discussed the importance of perspective. Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the Constitutional Convention was held in 1787, still has George Washington’s original chair where he sat at the front of the hall overseeing the proceedings. Day in and day out during the hot summer of 1787, he sat in the beautiful chair that had an image of the top half of the sun carved in the back. At the end of their deliberations, Benjamin Franklin is famously paraphrased as commenting, “I have often looked at that image behind the president without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now, at length, I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”

I have been to Independence Hall many times and always marveled at the space and the chair. I tried to imagine the heavy burden that was placed upon all of the attendees. Theirs was not an easy path, and the fledgling nation was often in peril. The outcome of their experiment in democracy taking place at the Constitutional Convention was far from certain. It is understandable that Ben Franklin would ponder which perspective he should take on the image of the sun on the back of Washington’s chair. However, despite the odds stacked against the durability of the young nation, ultimately, Franklin was optimistic. He put faith in the document they debated and created during that consequential summer. Fortunately, for our country and the world, his faith was not misplaced.

When I say that, I don’t mean that everything the founders did and everything that took place in the early days of our country was perfect. It wasn’t — the most obvious and glaring wrong being the evil practice of slavery — but that brings up another point on perspective. Do we condemn or, in today’s vernacular, cancel these founders and their good works because not all their ideas and actions hold up to today’s standards? We need to take care not to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater and use extreme caution when judging historical figures and their works with today’s lens. That certainly doesn’t mean we don’t discuss the bad, alongside the good, but simply trying to eliminate these figures and their ideas from the public sphere is a huge mistake. We must always continue to learn from our past and strive to improve, but at the Olene S. Walker Institute of Politics & Public Service at Weber State, we recognize that, when it comes to historical figures and events, discounting all the good for the bad would leave us without a past.

This time of year always causes me to think about a work my mother shared with me and my siblings that her father shared with her when she was a girl. It’s a letter by an early 16th century pioneer of the renaissance, Fra Giovanni Giocondo. Written to his friend on Christmas Eve, it is a potent reminder of what we should illuminate and how we should direct our focus and perspective, not only during this special time of year, but always. I encourage you to look up and read the entire document, but permit me to end with an excerpt here:

“Take peace! The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in darkness, could we but see. And to see, we only have to look. I beseech you to look! Life is so generous a giver. But we, judging its gifts by their covering, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering, and you will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love by wisdom, with power.”

Devin Wiser is the executive director of government relations and the director of the Olene S. Walker Institute of Politics & Public Service at Weber State University.