[MysticCat]

Originally Posted by Tom Earp

There is a lot of vandalism going on along with march's, protest with violence!

Has P CNess come amok of something that happened years ago? I am becoming very sad about all of this and do not know what to say?? Early Americans became terrorists against England to found America that we live in today.
Removing statues and names of Southern Soldiers is erasing our history that happened and can never be changed.

If anyone has visited any of the Civil War Battle fields know how somber the feeling is being there and I have been to many. It was a hard decision to make for the South to leave the Union but it was for many reasons.

So, what are your thoughts?

My thoughts . . .

I think way too many people have been drinking the Lost Cause Kool-Aid.

I think that way too many of the people worried about "erasing history" don't know the actual history to start with. (See the Lost Cause Kool-Aid above.)

I think that way too many people label as political correctness behavior that is nothing more than, in Neil Gaimon's words, "treating other people with respect."

I think way too many people defending Confederate monuments and memorials, as well as the use of Confederate symbols, are clueless—some willfully so—about how Confederate symbols were used (or not used) in the years immediately following the Civil War, as well as how they were used (or abused) in the Jim Crow era and throughout the Civil Rights Movement.

I think the use (or abuse) of Confederate symbols and imagery often has little to do with honoring those who fought for the Confederacy or even states' rights, and lots to do with other political motives or a mix of motives, be they white supremacy, perceived or real loss of privilege, distrust of the federal government, rebellion against the establishment, or whatever.

I could be quite wrong about this, but I think Robert E. Lee would have not have felt honored by the statues of him specifically and of Confederate soldiers generally, or by the apparent desire to hang on to the Lost Cause.

I think my heart sank when I was walking by the State Capitol a few weeks ago (before Charlottesville) and heard an African American mother tell her husband that she'd catch up with him in just a minute, that her young son wanted to check out what the monument down the block was. I knew what the monument was, knew that she would see the seal of the Confederate States of America and "To Our Confederate Dead." I tried to imagine what the conversation between that mother and son would be like, and it was hard to imagine it as anything other than painful for that mother.

I'll put my Southern cred—including ancestors who fought for the Confederacy—up against anyone else's. And I think the time is long past to have the conversation about moving these monuments off of public grounds where their presence equals endorsement of what they stand for and either putting them away for good or putting them in museums or cemeteries, on battlegrounds or somewhere else they can be seen in context.