I'll tip my hand early as to another reason why I felt compelled to put this little essay together. In my more than 70 years I have never seen so much lunacy in the public sector of my beloved nation. I reject about 90% of what is published in the newspapers and other media. It is all contrived, distorted and purpose driven and that purpose has nothing to with informing the American public.
I just finished watching a group of what I would call vandals destroy a statue of Confederate soldiers from in front of a the Kentucky court house. The statue was not scheduled to be removed. However, a group of what appeared to be Millennial age people eventually managed to tie a yellow towing strap around the neck of the statue and pull it down. They then proceeded to jump around, screaming, spiting, shouting, and kicking the statue.
It all appeared so primeval and primitive. All of this to express their disdain for what they believe is both a representation and institutionalization of slavery. They believe that somehow destroying representations from history such as statues they will in some way erase our history of slavery. They fail to realize that it is not the outward symbols of our sinfulness that keep our sin before our eyes but that it comes from our own hearts. Until we experience personal redemption our transgressions, and our sin is always before our eyes and a burden on our lives.
This neo-iconoclastic movement to remove from public display the artifacts and monuments to a period of history to which some now object is totally misguided. It didn’t work for the great Rameses II with regard to his effort to eradicate the memory of Hatshepsut. All over Egypt there are edifices and statues with have been damaged and defaced and yet you cannot mention the great Rameses II without also taking not of Hatshepsut. In fact, next to the Pyramids of Giza the second most visited site in Egypt may well be the Temple of Hatshepsut.
Damnatio memoriae has never succeeded and it will not succeed now. It is a fatally flawed idea. It has a built-in self destructiveness to its nature and insures that which is being destroyed is instead immortalized. The 21st century in America will go down in history as the iconoclastic period of politics and what has become known as political correctness. Oh, to be sure, the statues will be gone but the history will remain and demand to be accounted for. There are no time machines that can go back and change the course of history. What has been written has been written in indelible ink.
Not only does it not accomplish the goals of those who seek redress for history by hiding it from the public eye it strikes at the very heart of the nation’s founding. Slavery goes back to the foundation of the nation. Ironically it would include statues to Anthony Johnson as the patriarch of African American property owners. Johnson was an indentured servant from Angola who achieved freedom in the early 17th-century Colony of Virginia after serving his term of indenture.
Johnson, now a Virginian freeman and property owner, joined the likes of Washington and Jefferson. He was not only the first African American property owner part of the property he held was a slave. Hence, if this iconoclastic trend were it to continue would soon strike at the heart and soul of the nation.
I have a suggestion . . . . why not do what every generation in America has done. . . . revel in your story. Early Virginians glory in the first settlers who confronted a wilderness and overcame to build the Commonwealth of Virginia. The Irish, the Italians, the Germans all in their turn took the struggles of their founding American ancestors and stood proudly on these founding shoulders to continue their pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. Each in their time of struggle took a positive approach, kept a strong faith and marched on building a future for themselves and their children.
It is time to stop litigating the Civil War and slavery. The South lost, the North won; and, the slaves were freed. but the story stays the same.
I saw on the news this morning that some confederate memorial statues were removed in the dark of the night. I can only assume it is as an act of appeasement to avoid confrontation with the rift-raft of extremist on the Left and Right.
If I wanted to wax Biblical here I would say that they did it under the cover of darkness because their deeds are evil. "Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil." I could but I will not.
It will not work. It only causes a festering sore to worsen. Appeasement only puts off the inevitable. Ask the British how appeasement worked in their dealings with a per-WII Adolf Hitler.
Robert E. Lee, whose statue was the occasion, not the cause, of the events in Charlottesville this week, and perhaps the second best General this nation has ever produced turned down Lincoln's offer to command the Union Armies in favor of defending his home state Virginia based on tribalism. Personally he largely agreed with Lincoln but he could not with his sacred honor intact oppose his family and political birthplace.
In this matter of statues we are all a bit too hypocritical. At the same time thinking that the removal of statues will solve anything is being short-sighted. The answer lies in the hearts of the people. The people on both sides of this emotionally charges issue may not realize it but they have never taken the victory of the Union and the emancipation of the slave and run with it. They are stuck there.
If a modern day African American has strong emotional responses to statues of dead men they have not availed themselves of the freedom that 300,000 plus Union soldiers died to give them. By the same token white people in this modern era who are emotional connected to a bronze image as a representation of thie culture are just as enslaved as the plantation slave of the pre-Civil War era. Neither have availed themselves of the freedom for which so many died to give them and both are slaves to their lessor selves. To these people, I say, forget the monuments and the statues and walk in your freedom. Get busy pursuing your life and stop blaming the past for your lack of liberty and happiness.
The heart of man, says the Bible, "is desperately wicked and beyond understanding" and there are some things in our minds that can only be changed by the "renewing of the mind." This renewing of the mind only comes through faith in Jesus Christ.
"Therefore if any man [be] in Christ, [he is] a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new" (2 Cor. 5:17). This is God fulfilling of Ezekiel 36:26, "A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh."
How you suffered for your sanityHow you tried to set them free.
Perhaps they'll listen now.
For they could not love you
But still your love was true.
But still your love was true.
Moral heart disease is running rampant in our Land and we have thrown the only cure out of our public arena. "Sow to the wind and you will reap of the whirlwind."
I was born and raised on the Gulf Coast where living through a hurricane is a writ of passage in life. We know that hurricane come through with the winds out of the east producing heavy rain, tidal surge flood and structural damage of all kinds. Then there is a period of calm as the eye of the storm (lowest pressure area) passes over. People get out of the places they have sheltered to access the damage. There is a false sense of security by the novice but those who understand the storm quickly return to their shelter because the knnow this few moments of quietness is short lived. The wind will soon begin to pick up and the winds will now come from the west and we will experience the storm all over again.
For the last 60 years we have been living in the calm of the eye of the storm. Get ready folks we're only just now coming out of the eye of the storm and while it could get better it will not . . . it never does. . . .it always gets worse because there are forces of evil at work on both sides.
