Aside from people who hurt children, the elderly and animals, I really detest historical revisionists who come in the guise of righting wrongs, making amends, or attempting in some fashion to secure a do-over for things that can't be done over.
Case in point, the lamentable loss of authentic Southern history at every twist and turn.
As if removing statues, scratching off the wording on plaques, taking down pictures and putting other pictures in their places, removing books from schools and libraries will, in one jot or one tittle, truly change the past.
A whole slew of legislative efforts are on the table around the country to remove from sight the statues of historic figures like Jefferson Davis, who was many things before he was president of the Confederacy for four years. In the case of the Davis statue, it's actually a gift from the Sons of the Confederacy that can't seem to be given away. The SOC tried to give it to Virginia, but they couldn't find a place for it. Now, it's Mississippi that either can't or won't take it. Will refusing to erect the Davis statue make it any less likely that Davis was, in fact, president of the Confederacy?
In other places in years past the Confederate flag itself has been the source of grief. In Texas some years back, a plaque in Austin that made reference to the Confederacy was targeted for removal.
In Georgia, there's a move to get rid of a statue of three-term governor Eugene Talmadge at the statehouse. Will getting rid of this statue change the fact that Talmadge was a racist and a scoundrel?
See, this is the problem with some legislators -- black and white -- who don't really know what to do with themselves. They are conflicted even now, so many years after the Civil War has ended and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and '60s has, by many accounts, achieved its laudable goals.
In their efforts to make amends ad nauseum for a time in our nation's history that should never be forgotten, warts and all, they run the risk of doing the very thing they don't want us to do!
If you take away the statues, plaques and pictures, if you yank the books with racially charged language of a bygone era (think Mark Twain's novels), if you refuse to restore the elegant antebellum plantation homes alongside the pitifully poor slave shacks, how on earth is anyone supposed to compare and contrast anything and in so doing formulate an honest and balanced opinion?
Slavery never looks as bad as when you can compare the lives of humans relegated to tumbledown shantys to those of their white counterparts basking in opulent stately mansions.
Take away those mansions and you lose the impact.
Today's children NEED to know that the South is about more than Martin Luther King Jr's famous march across the Edmund Pettis bridge or the cruel church bombing in Atlanta that cost the lives of innocent children. They need to know it's even about more than the monumentally important integration effort at a Little Rock high school.
They need to know that the South today is also the result of what came before MLK, Atlanta, and Little Rock. Like an equation in mathematics, the South now is the sum of the Before plus the After. Everyone should know who the players were, what slavery was, who condoned it and why and who condemned it and why. They need to understand the politics and culture of the antebellum era, the perspectives that led to secession, and how those attitudes fueled racism into the modern day. They need to know something more substantial about ALL the historic figures, from Andrew Jackson and Robert E. Lee to Jefferson Davis and Ulysses S. Grant.
How can we possibly teach our children well if all we show and tell them is one side of the story?
I say put the Davis statue up alongside one of MLK or Frederick Douglass or Abraham Lincoln. Put facts on the plaques. Let viewers decide for themselves.
You don't do me any favors by rewriting history to make it more palatable. That's what they did in Soviet Russia for so many years when books lauding Lenin and Communism cluttered the shelves of every bookstore while the intriguing stories from the modern West were censored or banished altogether.
The Soviets perfected the art of historical revisionism.
Do we in America really want to do the same?
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