Reply to Confederate female memorial being moved from Arlington County

Forum Index » Metropolitan DC Local Politics

Reply to "Confederate female memorial being moved from Arlington County"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][b]This is good. [/b]

[i]The statue, unveiled in 1914, features a bronze woman, crowned with olive leaves, standing on a 32-foot pedestal, and was designed to represent the American South. According to Arlington, the woman holds a laurel wreath, a plow stock and a pruning hook, with a Biblical inscription at her feet that says: “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks.”[/i]

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/confederate-memorial-removed-coming-days-arlington-national-cemetery-105718054

[img]https://images.wsj.net/im-840733?width=1280&size=1[/img][/quote]

Is it really, though. Is the answer to just abolish anything that brings up that period in our history? You can’t simply remove and destroy. Well, I guess you can as evidenced here but it’s not the way. Learning from history, but still accepting this was a period in our county’s history, makes more sense. It’s like those people running around trying to shut down freedom of speech. Isn’t the the answer to have better speech- than to shut the other side down? [/quote]

It would be easier for me to agree with you — if, over the last 150 years or so, this country— as a whole — grappled honestly with the painfully ignoble aspects of our country’s history, and made sure that everyone understood our history, resolved to grow beyond it.  Instead, we got Jim Crow laws, legal racial segregation, a few years of complicated and modest progress, and, now, MAGA influencing everything from our “justice” system to books no longer available in school libraries.  
So, I’d agree with you that there are better ways to handle this country’s history, but what many people have learned from this period in history is that white supremacy has its benefits.  We had a century and a half to do better.  Many, including those who erected such statues and those who venerate them, have deliberately chosen not to.  [/quote]

You’re bringing to light “some people” but certainly not all. I am average American citizen with roots in both the north and south (and by south I mean plantation owners). I teach my children history is to be learned from and not repeated. We “do better” than our ancestors and that’s a fact. I will agree with you there are area lot of missteps throughout history. You can’t “make” everyone understand or agree with history and the right/wrong of it. The statutes, the renaming of bases (Ft Bragg to Ft Liberty) would make sense to me if it really was a decision made as a country or we came together to discuss and learn/grow. But what is being learned by our children’s generation by doing this? And what are we learning as a country? Division.  Just another, new, version of division and conflict. [/quote]

I disagree- the country was divided along ideological lines during Reconstruction and Andrew Johnson and the closing down of the Freedman's bureau and the reneging of promises of 5 acres and a mule and the  acquiescence of the northern whites to Jim Crow laws was another division- along the color line. This has always been a nation divided- it used to be that all the white people were on one side and it is now going back to being divided along ideological lines. The color line is still there but it is less important than the ideology one holds but the divisions were always there and the monuments were a compromise that the United States made to the descendants of the vanquished side, we still materially support the old Confederate States, since they are almost all financially dependent on the Northern and western states. The Union has just decided to cease honoring  the confederate war dead, it's time and we still give them welfare and material support which is the most important thing. If New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania all refused to Gove federal funding to Missouri, Mississippi Louisiana, etc then they could get angry.  Supporters of a strong federal government are feeling threatened and so they are using this means to assert themselves over the Staes right folks- to remind them that they lost and that the monuments were there as magnanimous gesture of good will by the the powerful federal government and they can remove that magninimity whenever they choose, the Union is supreme, states are 2nd class powers was settled by that war and it is open to being relitigated even though conservative with Roe plus teh elector shenanigans are trying to relitigate this. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics