I
want to admit that the march in Charlottesville is actually changing my mind on
something. I grew up a student of American
History. I earned two degrees in it focusing
primarily on the history of the American south.
Like many kids in the south what
first drew me to a love of history was the Civil War. I grew up a civil war buff, went to a number
of reenactments, toured battlefields, and as a kid I slept under a fairly large
framed portrait of Robert E. Lee (yes, lady killer I know). I am and will always be a fan of history. I will
always love the south, revere its history, and value the positives in its (flawed)
heroes. But this morning I cannot but
want to tear down Charlottesville’s Lee monument myself (with my bare hands if necessary).
The
debate of southern civil war monument removal is a hard and deeply personal one
for most southerners. It is one that
pits two huge forces at odds in our minds and hearts. On one side stands our reverence for those
who fought for our region against an invading army, an invading vision of the country’s
future, and an invading vision of what had been won for the country by their
family members in the Revolutionary War.
On the other side the deplorable sin that held the whole rotten damned
thing together. It is a hard debate
because as educated and aware southerners we carry deep appreciation for those in
our family trees that stood up to an army that literally burned down our region’s
cities and intentionally starved its citizenry, but we also carry deeply the sorrow
and guilt of the evil that had helped build those cities and helped drive many
of our kin to that defiance.
Whether
to continue to memorialize these particular, very human, individuals from a particularly
inhumane era is a debate I have had with a number of people on all sides. I have wrestled with it a lot and had largely
decided that history and the teaching of history itself is what is most
important. That at one point these monuments
were erected and it is up to us to teach the why’s. Not only the good stories about those in
monument or the good that those who erected the stone wanted to encapsulate but
also the flaws in those we are to remember and the evil in those who thought to
enshrine them. That more than anything
the statues of our past are kept today in order to spark that conversation. And that that deep honest contemplation of
our past is key and should be preserved no matter.
Screw all of that. Every single lousy bit of
it. Screw it all. There are victims of this white supremacist
nazi bullshit. There are congregates of
a church that were meant to feel fear. There
are people that got ran over in the streets.
There is a country in shock and a region again in pain. There is also a real
human being long buried in the earth who was a victim of this past weekend’s
violence. By no means is Robert E. Lee
anywhere near the most important victim in this terrorist attack, he is dead guy,
a corps. But he was an individual. One that history has thought enough of to commemorate
all over the south. But the man that I studied
growing up (the good and the ill) would have be appalled at the events of this
past weekend. I believe from all I have
read, that he would want the monument torn down too if this is what it engenders
in its "defense". These …f-ing morons… they spit on, they defile
the thing they thought to defend. By reminding us of the racist fervor that lead to the construction of (most of) these monuments more so than of the history the monuments could teach, these modern day racists have speed the removal of statues not slowed it.
And
I have to think, if even the person a monument was supposed to honor, would be ashamed
of the thing… tear it down. perhaps tear them all down. If this is what the defense of our history looks
like, we are not worthy of our history. Of course this is a very small minority
of those who would defend Lee’s monument, but again, I’m pretty darn certain
Lee himself (as flawed as he was) wouldn’t defend it, so I sure wont.
