Monuments are guideposts to the future
Ihave been thinking a lot about Mr. Ben Jones’ proposal (“A way out of no way out,” Rapp News, Aug. 9) to erect monuments to honor our county’s enslaved people and union soldiers who fought to preserve our nation as conceived by our founding fathers. It is a great idea with a suggestion. I am a descendant of Virginia plantation owners who enslaved people to work their lands and dry good stores and served in the confederacy. I have long been torn about recognizing it publicly, but I have never had any doubts about how I feel toward this legacy. It was wrong.
Slavery is wrong. And, there is no explaining it away. Regardless of what I may otherwise think of my ancestors and the challenges they faced in their time, I deplore their participation in a civil war to safeguard such inhumanity. Instead, I choose to lean forward and stand, E Pluribus Unum, with all my compatriots of these United States of America.
I look to monuments as tributes to people whose example we should emulate into the future. These are bottles with messages, launched upon the sea of history, for future generations to ponder. They should always remind us that we, too, can rise above our particular circumstances to do better for ourselves and those around us. Our monuments should memorialize people who stood, fought or died in furtherance of something bigger than themselves. Something worth ghting for again and again until realized.
I do not want our children’s children to look up to people who sought to break up our Republic only to replace it with a constitution that enshrined the subjugation of its people into servitude. A community cannot thrive by looking backwards to failed ideas none of us would tolerate today. For these reasons, moving the monument to Confederate soldiers from the front of the county courthouse also makes sense.
To bring everyone together, I suggest we should solemnly transfer our Confederate monument to a hallowed spot in the graveyard where it would stand alongside the proposed new monuments in memory of enslaved people and union soldiers. In this way, we can all honor our forebears and consider the lessons of the past. Back on the public square in the world of the living, let’s all look up to our better angels and move forward constructively, in unison.