From The Editor: On Monuments and the Silent Majority

Originally published August 2020 · p. 2

From The Editor: On Monuments and the Silent Majority On June 22, in the dead of night, the Confederate soldier monument in Greenville, N.C., came down. It offended people. The next day, one of the leaders for getting the city to take it down, said it was just the start. In cities across the country, monuments are being removed for “storage in a safe place” as one official put it. Others are being vandalized and damaged with police standing by doing nothing despite laws saying the activity is illegal because they have been told to “stand down.” Many statues have nothing to do with the Civil War, slavery, or the Confederacy. Even a U.S. Grant statue was toppled and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry (the “Glory Regiment”) was vandalized. CWN is not covering the destruction, vandalism, and sudden removal of multiple Confederate monuments as individual stories. The topic is so extremely controversial,and there are so many examples, that coverage would not only take up the entire monthly CWN issue, it is a no-win topic. Our coverage would anger and raise the blood pressure of both sides because we would try to present a balanced view. We recognize that this destruction of symbols is occurring and that it represents a dangerous shift in attitudes and official complicity, but to continually beat the horse would not be in anyone’s interest to rail against anonymity and would serve to keep the issue alive and that seems to be what one faction wants. For many of us, this is destruction of history, not my history, or our history, but just simply history. When these monuments are gone, as the one in Greenville, where do the rallying points and teaching moments appear? A lesson can be seen in more recent German history. Many extermination and forced labor camps are still there, albeit in reduced form, precisely because they serve as reminders of something truly evil. They are visited every year by student classes who are told, in precise language, exactly what happened there, and made to confront their past, a past within living memory, a past that must be repeated. The narrow minded, rush to judgment, do it now, demonstrators fail to see how important these monuments are to them and their crusade for justice. They are so off the mark! They seem to fear the past; but the monuments should serve to remind them, “never again!” in the words of the Jewish Defense League comment about the Holocaust. What if, instead of tearing down a monument to a county’s dead Confederates, they moved to erect a monument to the U.S. Colored Troops, some of whom came from the same county, or to the county residents who fought in Union regiments. The teaching moment is here but they are missing the point. There’s another aspect to this; Americans tend to joke about the crook, rustler, or ancestor hung for piracy because it stands out. A hundred years ago, people used to joke about having an Irish, Italian, Hungarian, Yankee, or adopted ancestor. Note that I’ve deliberately not said Native American or African ancestor, even though they might well have influenced a family’s lineage, and vice versa, because political correctness and personal sensibilities might be affronted. That omission is telling, but it really is a teaching moment for both sides of the political correctness prism. More importantly, once it is recognized, confronted, and dealt with, it becomes another thread that helps hold our nation together. At the same time, the silent majority does little or nothing, just sitting by, knowing that school curricula are no longer talking about slavery and America’s past. One letter writer said Black Confederates are irrelevant, but they really are relevant; they show that a national people have a great many variations and that nothing is either black nor white; they form a crazy quilt of emotional highs and lows. For the future, it is time to stop tearing things down and start building things again and teaching about our national failures just so we don’t repeat them. If there is no rallying point to call attention to some part of our past that was wrong, or really bad, how can focus be brought to bear on the problem? Larry Babits CWN Editor