Statues, flags, and uncivil wars

The Confederate statue in the town square of Bentonville was vandalized recently. The statue has been controversial in recent months, with a portion of the city wanting it removed and another faction rallying to save it.

This issue remains unresolved, and meanwhile the statue’s figure is missing a portion of his rifle. No one knows if the vandal had politics on his mind or was just being malicious.

A quick Internet search reveals nearly 800 similar Confederate monuments around the country. Several of these have been also subjected to challenges by various groups who see them as monuments to white supremacy.

Our General Assembly wasted a great deal of time in the past session debating whether the star on our state flag that symbolizes Arkansas’ governance by the Confederacy should be removed or replaced or designated to represent something else. Status quo prevailed, but the arguments in favor of leaving that star as is reveal how much support remains for the short rebellion of the Confederacy.

I was raised in the South. Specifically, the Florida panhandle, aka the Redneck Riviera, and in Pine Bluff. As a young boy, I was fascinated with the Civil War and read many books about its battles. I visited Civil War battlefields like Vicksburg, Gettysburg, and Antietam. I identified with the underdog Confederates who outsmarted and outfought those damn Yankees until the bitter end when they were overwhelmed by superior forces. As a very young boy, I played with toy Union and Confederate soldiers. I was always the Confederate general in those make-believe battles.

My heroes were generals like J.E.B. Stuart and Col. Mosby (the Gray Ghost) and Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. Slavery was hardly emphasized in those romantic novels I read about the War for Southern Independence. If the causes of the war came up at all, it was about protecting “States’ Rights” more than the Union’s need to put down a massive rebellion and to end slavery.

I never looked at the Rebel battle flag as a symbol of white supremacy. It just represented a forlorn and lost cause. “The South will rise again” was bumper-sticker sentiment that many of us enjoyed.

When the first black students began attending my high school in the ’60s (there were about three or four, as I recall), there was still a statue of a Confederate soldier on our campus that had been there since the 1920s. I sat on the steps of that statue many times and never made any connection between it and the people of that era who were trying to send a message about white supremacy.

Eventually, after reading more objective histories of the Civil War and being exposed to some excellent professors in college, I lost my enchantment with the “lost cause” and began to see what an ugly, inhumane, and tragic phase of our history slavery really was. I began to wonder why so many Southerners who didn’t even own slaves would sacrifice their lives for the cause.

At age 17, I set out to write a high school term paper on the Vietnam War. It was 1966 and the war had escalated into a full-blown conflict between the U.S. and North Vietnam. I started the paper with a solid belief in the Domino Theory and the righteousness of our cause against the communists. By the time I was finished, I had waded through dozens of U.S. News, Time, Newsweek and newspaper accounts, not to mention earlier histories of French colonial rule.

The term paper was titled “Vietnam: Pro and Con.” I came away with a different point of view.

My paper concluded that there were significant flaws in our Vietnam policies and therefore strong reasons to oppose continued U.S. interdiction. This was a civil war between two different factions of the same people. The fact that one side called themselves communists did not change this elementary fact. We had no more right to intervene in Vietnam than Great Britain or France did in our Civil War.

I also began to doubt whether LBJ and McNamara and all of our forces could pull out a victory. When I went to college the following year, my sympathies were absolutely with the student war protesters around the country.

These two different civil wars were insane, ugly conflicts that left lasting scars on our Republic. We are still struggling with the aftermath of the U.S. Civil

War. Civil rights laws were a big step but have not eradicated racial injustice or racism. The current White House administration seems bent on pushing an anti-civil rights agenda and formulating racial division. From the looks of things, this hasn’t been too hard to accomplish.

We also remain a nation mourning the effects of the Vietnam War which reaped such tragedy upon the Vietnamese people, killing more than a million of them. The Vietnam conflict also ruptured the American people’s confidence in our government and caused many of us to doubt our nation’s integrity and righteousness. The pride created from our victories in World War II by the Greatest Generation was severely tarnished by news stories and movies about American war crimes and drug infested troops.

I was young and stupid once. Or at least ignorant. I’d like to think I have been able to challenge my youthful paradigms and consider facts that contradicted my views. It’s probable that a great many white boys grew up like I did, romanticizing war, and in particular the rebel cause. A lot of those Southern boys volunteered to fight in the Vietnam War. Too many of them died or returned horribly wounded and mentally damaged. So in a way, the Civil War killed a whole bunch of us all over again.

The recent issues with the Confederate star on the Arkansas Flag and the Confederate monument in Bentonville brought up all of these thoughts. Symbols are important. And flags are the ultimate symbols. I looked at those old white guys in our Legislature defending the Confederacy and was embarrassed that I ever thought that way.

How long are we going to fight that damn war? Just eliminate the star and go back to the three-star version we had before it was added. Move those old monuments to privately owned grounds and place a disclaimer plaque on them. We should not be commemorating a war of rebellion against our Constitution and our Union, especially one fought to defend a truly horrible institution like slavery.