Peterff wrote:
It isn't being thrown away. It is part of history and a product of the times. Slavery was and still is evil. So is discrimination whether based on color, ethnicity, religion, appearance, gender, or sexual preference.
The US civil war history is what it is. Nobody can change that. The monuments are being used as symbols by various factions for current political purposes which is a real problem in current society. We are experiencing riots, murder, and mayhem as a result of that.
We need to do what we can to remove those symbols to avoid their misuse, but they should not be destroyed. History, and its symbols need to be preserved, but not displayed in high profile situations where they can be used to support extremist viewpoints or cause significant offense to the population.
The monuments and associated history need to be protected, which may mean moving them to different locations so that they cannot be used as excuses for extremist behavior by any faction.
Germany has done pretty good job of dealing with its history. We could learn a lot by following that example.
It isn't being thrown away. It is part of history ... (
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Peter, thanks for a reasoned opinion on this issue.
There are many who want to destroy all evidence of the confederacy, and many who wish to flaunt it, yelling, "The South shall rise again!" Those are fantasies, surely, but many just want to preserve their heritage, while many others just want to erase a sore spot.
I agree, putting the statues and monuments in a museum is smart. Greensboro just renamed a school and a park to forget the original namesake's dedication to slavery. But his story remains in the local history.
Violence and extremism of all kinds are unnecessary and only lead to conflict.
It's been weird, living in the Carolinas most of my life, but having Midwestern parents. I have learned a good bit of history as presented by Northerners and a good bit of history as presented by Southerners. Each points to quite different reasons for that war, with quite different outcomes. I tend to see both sides... to a point.
Yes, it was most important as the war to end forced slavery, but it was also a war of protest against Northern economic oppression of Southern progress. In the mid-19th century, most of the South had an agrarian economy. In NC, many grew tobacco, cotton, peanuts, rice, and other crops. Most of the crops and other raw materials were shipped North to manufacturers, converted to finished goods, and sold all over. But there were some onerous taxes involved, and there was social and economic suppression of information and technology that would have allowed the advancement of the Southern economy to include manufacturing. Southerners knew that if they lost the almost free labor of slaves, their economy would be brought to the brink of ruin, at least for a time. The war proved that true, although most *Americans* would agree the abolition of slavery was worth it.
It wasn't until the turn of the 20th century that the economy of the South began to include a lot more manufacturing. The pace of change accelerated slowly at first, and rapidly after air conditioning became widely available in the 1950s. "Rust belt" companies gradually located plants in the rural and suburban South, mostly to get away from union labor and exploit cheap water, power, natural gas, and wood. The rise of educational institutions had much to do with it, as did urbanization and urban migration in some areas.
Of course, after NAFTA, companies escaped the South for the Far East and South America... Ah, the law of unintended consequences is always hard at work!
The aristocratic sons and daughters of the Confederacy still bear grudges over the loss of their economic status "way back when", and the subsequent "economic punishment" they endured for several decades after the war. The resentment is different among upper, middle, and lower (white) classes, too. Poor whites tend to have a completely different set of resentments (labor competition among the races) from the learned upper class. And the middle class tends to be irrationally schizoid about their history. They, too, resented the introduction of another (paid) labor pool after the Civil War, but no longer want to perform the menial labor in fields and mills that immigrants and foreign workers will do willingly. They'll flip burgers or do data entry, but won't scrub floors or pick crops, and they won't lower their living standards to compete with foreign workers. It's taken several generations for education to become a priority as a ticket to success here. In the North, that ticket was identified rather clearly during the depression, as my parents were always quick to point out.
If I've heard it once, I've heard it a hundred times. "The sins of the forefathers are passed down for seven generations." Well, 7 generations after the war was the year 2005... So we ought to see some progress by now. We do, but pockets of cancerous, racist, narcissistic nostalgia remain.
So it's complicated... Cities like Charlotte, NC, where I lived for 35 years, are huge melting pots of people from all over the USA and the world, in addition to their small contingents of local descendants. So they tend to be pretty liberal and tolerant, by comparison with smaller towns. That liberalism is another source of conflict. NC is a purple state, with the main urban markets predominantly liberal, and most of the rural areas quite conservative.
So when I see news like we saw last week, I cringe and wonder what will pop up next --- and where?