Why can't we ferget?
I'm southern.
I talk like one. I eat like one, even grits. I was born like one. I know all the words to "Dixie." And by the time I was 12 I had read "Gone With the Wind" more than once.
But I still don't understand all this Confederate stuff.
A Georgia State Senator has introduced legislation that would set aside a month to honor the Confederacy. He wants it taught in our public schools and I suppose he wants us send a birthday card to Jefferson Davis. No, make that Robert E. Lee.
Sen. Jeff Mullis makes it sound as if this is history for the sake of history. It is a sheer coincidence that the General Assembly is sitting on a bill that calls for an apology for slavery.
To quote that noted Civil War historian Rodney King, "Can't we all just get along?
Look at the Barnes & Noble shelves. Notice all the books on Civil War history. Every skirmish is replayed in print. Every general is profiled. There are books that wonder what it would have been like if the South had won the war and others that explain why it didn't.
We have a museum here in Columbus that honors the Confederate navy. Pretty soon we'll have one for the old gray quartermasters. In bars, people stand with lighters held high and hands over their hearts while the band plays "Dixie." The Stars and Bars sometimes seem more important than the Stars & Stripes. It is a war that won't quit and after nearly 150 years, won't go away.
Lee and Grant shook hands. Why can't we?
This episode playing out in at the state capitol is a throwback to 1956 when Georgia legislators created a state flag that was supposed to be an answer to the Supreme Court and its decision to desegregate our schools. It was anger, not history. That also created an undying issue. Just look at our flag today.
I really don't understand the theory of apology either. Whose soul is going to be cleansed by an "I'm sorry." Several years ago, I was there at the White House when Bill Clinton apologized to the survivors of the Tuskegee Syphillis project. I watched the faces of these old men as the president talked with them. I saw their tears. I saw their relief. But that apology was more than symbolism. It was face to face, heart to heart.
We can't do that with the Civil War. That war is over. Or is it?
3 comments:
There has been, and still is an ongoing effort to create something of a blind between contemporary society and certain aspects of our history. Those aspects we are speaking of are, of course, the history and heritage of the old South. Much of it is based in the single memory of slavery and to that point, I personally have no argument. It was then, is now and will be forever wrong. But like the tune, “Song of the South” from the band, Alabama…
“Gone, gone with the wind.
There aint nobody looking back again.”
Should we throw the baby out with the bathwater? For some... if it makes enough people happy... why not?
But regardless of what is popular or politically correct, playing the part of crass appeaser doesn’t do much for anyone’s moral standing.
So do please understand that many of us, while harboring no wish whatsoever to return to the bad old days, do quite want to see Southern history and culture preserved. There is much that can be learned from it, both in what we should continue to embrace and in what we should never again want to even get close to.
You may not understand that but… perhaps you can find a way to respect it without tarnishing your armor.
We can preserve it without bringing it up once a year. How will we ever become one if we continue thinking it is us and them?
And yes, the same holds true for black history month. It too reminds us of seperation instead of unity.
There is a problem with your logic. As a father of a current 13 year old in Georgia, I know that the public school curriculum allows for 1 week tops in 5th grade and 8th grade to cover the War Between the States. Other than that - there is absolutely ZERO places in school for this subject matter to be taught.
You would further dumb our children down by not even allowing it once per year. Way to go Stalin.
Confederate History month is not equal to Black history month. One could teach us about the 1st working submarine to sink an enemy or the lineage of the famous Stonewall Brigade, that later was among the 1st on D-Day at Normandy and later fighting the War on Terrorism in 2007.
Black history never tells us the 1st legal slave owner in America was a Black man named Anthony Johnson, whose slave was a black man named John Casor, but beats into our youth's minds about what a god Martin Luther King Jr was and the 1st black elected here, and the 1st black to enter there.
And it is a low down dirty shame you parrot the "Big Lie" about the 1956 Georgia state flag. There is ABSOLUTELY no evidence - be it quote, statement, article, or picture, that the 56 flag was created as a response to Brown vs BOE. There is however a ton of evidence to the contrary. If you get such a simple fact as that screwed up, how do you expect to get the public to buy your books?
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