Charlottesville

I am a processor. I am a thinker. I rarely react emotionally. If you know me, that last statement may make you laugh.

When I’m being attacked, it takes a long time for me to get to the point wherein I will lash out or take action to defend myself. I grew up always trying to be the peacemaker. If you’ve seen my ugly side, it’s because I was pushed to that point. It is never my knee-jerk reaction. 

I’ve taken time to process what happened in Charlottesville last weekend. I’ve been really chewing on how I feel about monuments to confederate soldiers being removed. A long time. 

I do not and will never support the KKK or white supremacists. I just don’t think that there is a superior race. I know a lot of wonderful white people, black people, Asian people, Hispanic people. I also know a lot of assholes who are white, black, Asian and Hispanic. People are people. I honestly don’t know why this needs to be said, but alas, it does. 

Back in 2005, my Patriots defeated the Eagles. I went to a meeting the next day in the greater Philadelphia area, and someone said that they wished Philly were having a parade. I looked at her and said, “Parades are for winners. They’re having a parade in Boston tomorrow, if you’d like to go.” She was pissed, I was amused. 

Stick with me. I’m about to connect the dots. 

The Civil War was fought for one reason. The southern states wanted to secede from the union because the union wanted to outlaw slavery. The union won. The confederacy lost. In the simplest of terms, taking out all of the emotions, why ARE there monuments to the losers of the civil war? That is just stupid. 

If you go to Germany, Poland, anywhere in Europe, I’m fairly certain that you’re not going to find statues of Hitler and his cabinet. You know what you do find? Memorials of the people who were killed. Memorials to remind people of the atrocities that were committed during WWII. Museums filled with information for those who seek to understand WWII. 

So yeah, this conservative republican thinks that the monuments should be taken down. Don’t destroy them, though. Find out who funded them and make those people build a state of the art Civil War museum. 

Make sure that there is an actual Civil War expert consulted to work with the museum curators to truly drive home the atrocities that were committed during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Highlight the suppliers and the buyers. Explain what it was to be a slave on a plantation. Draw comparisons between life then and life now in the inner cities of America. Really dig deep and expose what was and what is. Make it a truly educational experience.