by Sixstrings » Fri 26 Jun 2015, 17:59:12
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AgentR11', 'I') really, REALLY, dislike this trend of wanting to sanitize history.
We are who we are, both the good and the bad, because of those who went before us, who did both good, and bad.
I'm generally with you Agent, and Cog, on this issue.
But.
It's all the fault of the red states' instransigence and extreme stubbornness, on a wide range of issues. From rolling back civil rights era Voting Rights Act, and now actively restricting voting rights again, to all the Obamacare opposition,
and then one day the final straw was that the governor of South Carolina could not so much as lower the rebel flag to half staff.That's how revolutions work. People just finally have enough, at some point, and the guy in charelston was a madman terrorist -- but this other stuff is all peaceful. It's a "color revolution" "velvet revolution" type of thing, just a mass consensus forming and people take to the streets and tear down the old flag and statues.
I'm not saying I'm for this, at all, I'm saying it's all Republicans fault for letting it get so far and for not moving forward sooner.
If you allow your regional culture to become something that the majority culture cannot abide anymore, then yes, one day all of corporate america and the zeitgeist consensus culture will turn on it and shun it and take the statues down and push it all away, in disgust at it.
As for the OP --
I think that is reasonable, if it's a statue and burial of a particularly horrible racist that actually started the KKK?
Of course, there has to be a line somewhere. President Andrew Jackson was a horrible racist and against Indians too (still a complicated man though, his own adopted son was native american). So what are we gonna do, erase Andrew Jackson from history as well?
And, by today's standards, even Abraham Lincoln had racist views.
Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton of today are not anti-gay equality, but wind the clock back 8 years and they both were. Wind the clock back 10 years before that, and Hillary sounded like "murrage is a man and a wohman" redneck.
So do we erase Obama and Clinton's record in history, shun them from politics, because they had some bigoted views in the past?
See how silly this gets? You can't view all of history through the prism of today. Our own great great grandkids will look back at us, and there will be issues that our descendents think that we right now are such horrible bigoted people about. They may want to move OUR graves. Who knows what that issue will be, perhaps they'll never forgive us for greenhouse pollution. Etc.In my state, we have a lot of historical commemoration of the spanish conquistadors. The conquistadors were all really horrible bad guys, they were just mercenaries and conquerers and slavers, lookin' for gold, and were responsible for genocide of all the native peoples in the Americas.
Honestly, there shouldn't be any monuments to conquistadors. They aren't even Americans, for goodness sake.
The thing is, though -- ALL THE WORLD'S HISTORY has bad in it, what would a Britain do, just erase king henry and william the conqueror and most of their monarchs and most of their imperial history because half of it was really horrible?
I'd agree with taking the rebel flags down at all government public places.
I'd agree with some cases of removing statues and graves and monuments, IF it was just some 2nd tier outright racist bad guy.
We can't go as far though as taking down Robert E. Lee statues. And historical sites shouldn't be shut down either, the best way to handle it is to just present ALL of the history at these places. My town has a "plantation" historical site. It's like a living history museum, you just see how things were back in those days.
The right thing to do though would be to turn these places into educational centers for the history of slavery as well, and denial of civil rights, and black history too. That's the solution there, just present all the history and school kids visiting these things could learn about the bad and then the good things too about the shared culture.
The entire culture is not just all bad, remember Southern culture is black too. We all eat "hush puppies." We've all come to like soul food, and collard greens. We all like gospel music. There's a lot here that is both of our culture, black and white.
How a Southerner would feel on this stuff, is just like how a new englander would feel if someone wanted to erase all their culture and history just because the puritans burned witches and maybe because the northeast treated immigrants so badly, in the 1800s, and a lot of issues.
Heck, look at womens' rights -- ALL MEN were misogynists, until recent decades.
CNN had a 1960s documentary series recently, they played a lot of John Kennedy talking about women. Holy cow that guy was a real chauvinist. President of the US, saying marriage is like riding a horse. That only one can have the reins or the two can't get anywhere. So, the rider is the man with the reins and the horse is the woman.
So do we erase all of John Kennedy history, too?
And even Lyndon Johnson, he used the N word. He was honestly a bit of a bigot, even though he CHANGED a bit and actually enforced civil rights -- yet he still used that N word.
