We may not have the greatest of history but why should we rid ourselves of reminders of what we once were – PB/TK
For next Memorial Day, how about getting rid of those Confederate statues in the nation’s Capitol? – By Meteor Blades / May 29 2017
The year my mother moved the two of us from southwest Georgia—1956—was the same year the legislature there chose to unfurl a new state flag in defiance of the desegregation mandate of the Supreme Court’s unanimous Brown v. Board of Education ruling. The lawmakers chose the most prominent part of that new flag to replicate the battle banner of the Army of Northern Virginia, a flag that in its rectangular form has come to be seen by most Americans as the Confederate flag, often mistakenly calling it the “Stars and Bars.” Since I was but 9 at the time, I didn’t really understand the significance of the legislature’s move nor the significance of the Confederate statues erected in the town square of my birthplace and other nearby Georgia and Florida cities and towns we had visited or at least driven through. Only in my late teens did I come to appreciate the hateful nature of the battle flag and these monuments to treason and slavery.
Ever since I came to understand, more than half a century ago, I’ve been amazed that more effort wasn’t given over to dumping into a landfill or a furnace these representatives of savage inhumanity.
So I’ve been delighted to watch the past few years as these disgraceful emblems in support of keeping humans in bondage have been belatedly removed from their places of honor. It would have been better, in my view, if the flags had been torched and the statues chained and yanked into the street like many of the statues of Lenin and Stalin after the U.S.S.R. bit the dust. But seeing them removed from public spaces will have to be good enough.
Continue to dailykos.com article: http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/5/29/1666851/-For-next-Memorial-Day-how-about-getting-rid-of-those-Confederate-statues-in-the-nation-s-Capitol
