A compromise broached
In a continued spirit of civil dialogue, let us remain constructive and consider today a proposed compromise on Confederate monuments.
It begins as follows: Those who are romantically attached to the Confederate States of America and determined to fight to preserve its monuments in the public square may continue to have those monuments as they are and where they are.
No one else pays much attention to them. I doubt Rebel romanticists pay much attention except when they get worked up over the idea that politically correct liberals are coming.
These kinds of arguments are almost always less about anything constructive than everything fearful and resentful.
Let’s face the fact: If we try to take these statues down, then the unreconstructed rebels will make a public spectacle. Then those resistant to their retrogression, believing anything short of vigorous resistance is appeasement of racism, will counter with their own public spectacle.
That’s two spectacles too many.
Some modern devotees of the Confederacy are simply un- evolved. They’re not filled with hate, but limited by perspective.
But there are outright human horrors among them, meaning those openly professing racial and ethnic hatred, espousing white supremacy and celebrating Nazism.
As a simple tactical consideration, those beasts are not worth our trouble.
Most of us have a 21st century to live in, a preposterous presidency to survive and human evolution to experience.
White supremacists and neo- Nazis may go ahead with their waving of the flags of hatred, the performance of Hitler salutes and the updating of despicable websites. It’s a free country. The great American majority will aspire in the meantime to return to the glorious bliss achieved by oblivion of them— until their fascism arose in Charlottesville to infect our consciousness.
So, to the proposed compromise: In return for letting Rebel monuments stand, I ask only that the non- haters among monument loyalists— the mere Rebel romanticists who might be receptive to broader and fair- minded perspective— open their minds to the extent possible and read and consider to the end through two points I wish to develop.
First, about ancestry: Everybody has one. Most of us treasure ours. But some of us endeavor, even as we treasure it, to evolve from it objectively.
Others of you immerse yourselves in that ancestry, in yesteryear. You are egocentric and anachronistic.
You can treasure your ancestors and, at the same time, learn and accept, by your evolution and the world’s, that your ancestors were wrong.
You can treasure your ancestors and, at the same time, come to respect that an insistence on public- space celebration of your ancestors degrades others’ ancestors whose enslavement your ancestors were fighting to preserve. All ancestries were created equal. Consider the great- great grandsons of Stonewall Jackson, the fierce Confederate general whose monument stands in Richmond, pointed northward, as if to be fighting still.
These two descendants, Jack and Warren Christian, last week published an open letter calling for removal of their ancestor’s monument.
They wrote that they were proud of their great- great- grandfather, but not of what his monument represented. They said they were equally proud of their great- great grand- aunt, Stonewall’s sister, an abolitionist who sided with the Union.
“Your relationship to your family heritage changes over time, and it can and should evolve,” they wrote.
You can be proud of your Civil War ancestors and yet use indoor plumbing, drive a car, watch television and use a computer.
Beloved personal ancestors are best memorialized in private cemeteries with privately secured gravestone— by the private market, not big government.
Second, about the real context these Confederate monuments represent: Most of them, at least in the South where they are predominantly located, began rising in public squares in the 1890s. That was largely at the behest of women wanting to honor their husbands who were surviving Confederate soldiers and beginning in that decade to die.
But the monuments proliferated after that, until the 1930s, mainly through a Southern period of lynching and Jim Crow laws that segregated and oppressed black people. Smalltown Southern white men would sit at city council meetings and vote to install Confederate monuments, then don hooded robes to terrorize black people.
Those monuments are less about memorializing the Civil War and honoring ancestors than about continued post- war defiance and the proudly lingering racist evil of the region.
Some suggest keeping the monuments erect, but adding new explanations about the bitter truths of the Civil War.
I’m for whatever works, but bitter truth is the very thing the romanticists and racists rise against.
Anyway, a statue of Robert E. Lee doesn’t stand to educate anyone about the war. It extols a person, in this case one of many fine attributes who, fatefully, fought against his own great country on the wrong side of history.
I embrace the pragmatic solution: Leave the monuments alone and go back to giving them the thorough ignoring they deserve.