Keeping The Statues, and Adding More

THERE'S NO REASON NOT TO just go ahead and tell the damned truth, even if we don't want to. Eventually it'll come out anyway. Fir instance, let's get this straight: every damned time a group of people gather together to protest the removal of a confederate civil war statue, the statue isn't the real issued. The real issue is racism, white supremacy, or segregation, take your pick. These statue huggers, invariably right wingers, for the most part know nothing about the American or any other civil war, and don't really care about it. Nor do they care about state's rights, and all that bull. Today's statue huggers have the same racist motivation that our ancestors did when they erected them in the first place, back around the turn of the twentieth century, generally. They were erected long after the war was over, by people who didn't fight in the war or know anyone who did. They were erected as a right racist backlash to the reconstruction era, when the Yankee federal government in Washington shoved racial equality down southern throats. A generation after the war, Jim Crow laws proliferated, and a century of segregation and oppression began for the former slaves. No, the European-American "white" portion of the American people should not, by any stretch of the imagination, feel very good about the history of their treatment of blacks in America, then, or now. Its that simple. One African-American lady was heard to mention that no statue of Robert E. Lee could hurt anybody unless it falls on them. True, but maybe not quite the point. Early in the twentieth century, the Klan flourished, and the statues were erected by racists wanting to remind everyone of white superiority. OK then, let's leave the statues up, since it doesn't seem likely that any of them will fall on anyone. but let's put up more. let's put up a big statue of martin Luther King, striding forward, followed by freedom marchers, walking straight towards Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis or even Stonewall Jackson. And maybe a Rosa Parks statue sitting in a seat, smiling, looking at Lee, or Booker T. Washington lecturing a row of confederate soldiers, standing at attention, with the light of new understanding gleaming in their youthful, innocent eyes.