What has this to do with tech? I don’t know — cranes are technology, right? Sure, works for me.
So RFK, the worst Kennedy (which is saying something, given the existence of the patriarch Joe Kennedy Sr.), or the worm in his brain, apparently has a sad whenever a statue of a Confederate traitor is removed. He doesn’t think “it’s a good, healthy thing for any culture to erase history,”
Sigh.
Apparently, we are going to have to do this until all the boomers, and maybe even all my fellow GenXers, raised on the Dunning School’s whitewashing of treason in defense of slavery die off. But once again, for the ones not paying attention in the back: removing statues does not hide history. It just says that the person represented by the statue is not worthy of emulation. That’s it. Nothing more, but nothing less.
The history of the Civil War era is easy to discover. Impeached is an excellent book about that time. So is Battle Cry Freedom. So is Reconstruction: America’s Unfished Revolution. There are museums all over the country that cover the period exceptionally well. I have never been, but I am told that both Gettysburg and Harper’s Ferry are especially well done. No one need go wanting in their desire to learn about the Civil War and its fallout because statues of Confederates are no longer given a place of honor.
That is the true purpose of public statues: honor. We place these monuments in public so that people will know that we honor these people, will know that their actions are to be admired and emulated. That these people, though human like the rest of us, rose to an occasion and provided our nation, our society, our shared humanity, with something to value, to cherish. They are people to be looked up to, to model our best selves after.
Not a single person who fought for the Confederacy deserves that honor, at least not for their actions while under arms. To a man, they fought for a rebellion dedicated, in the words of the people who committed that treason, to the proposition that “ … the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
There was never any honor in such a cause. No one who defended such a rebellion deserves emulation.
It does not matter that some of your ancestors may have fought for the Confederacy, may have even been brave under fire. They were wrong to have done so. And that is no mark against you — we all have assholes in our ancestry. That fact is not a mark against us unless we insist on granting them honor that they have not earned and do not deserve.
Removing these statues is not erasing history. It is correcting an error. They never belonged on those pedestals, figuratively or literally. By removing them, by saying “no, these are not the best of us, they do not represent the best we can be, they should not be emulated”, we are making our society just a little bit better.
I would hope that even RFK’s worm can see the good in that.
