A continuation with corrections and clarification

My previous posting about southern historical revisionists needs revising. I wrote it late at night -- when I do most of my writing -- and in reviewing it I discovered some mistakes.

First, the word "shanties," the plural form of "shanty" was misspelled. Ugh. I hate misspelled words.

Second, it's worth clarifying that the Soviets didn't only stock their bookstores with an overabundance of Lenin's works while banning most of the literature from the West, they also did a great job of banning many of the writings of their own intellectuals.

Third, I remembered after I posted that it is illegal in Germany to display photos of Adolph Hitler or other Nazi swine, so great is the national shame over that time in history and the cumulative desire to never see Nazism rise up again.

Should we do the same thing here? Should we make it illegal to post photos or put up statues of Robert E. Lee, Jeff Davis, Stonewall Jackson or other Civil War figures? And if we go to that extreme, should we then reconsider the images that abound of many of our nation's founding fathers who also owned or at least condoned the owning of slaves? Should we consider banning images of President Harry Truman who gave the order to drop the atomic bombs over Japan? Talk about a calculated mass killing. What about former President Geo. Bush and his wars on two fronts? Ban his likeness, too?

See how silly this all becomes. It turns into a game of "my people's horror was worse than your people's horror," an argument that goes nowhere fast. As far as southern legislators go, their protests over flags, statues, plaques and books all smack of grandstanding. It's righteous indignation that looks and sounds good until you start picking it apart. Then it just looks like nothing but a waste of breath and tax dollars.

How open do we want to be as a society? What parts of our history are worth preserving in the context in which they occurred?

Personally, I want to read it all and I want my children to read it all. The good, the bad, the ugly, the redeemable and the redeemed.