RINO Tom
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Posts: 17,015
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E: 2.45, S: -0.52
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« on: August 23, 2017, 04:24:52 PM » |
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I had a long talk about this with my dad (lifelong Northerner, favorite President is Lincoln, adamant that the war was about slavery, etc.), and I kind of came around to his view. If it were up to me personally, (some of) these statues would have never gone up. I have zero sympathy for the Confederacy and have always found it strange that any modern day Southerners - with all they have to be proud of about their region - feel some "connection" to a group of traitors and rebels who happened by pure coincidence to hail from the same geographic territory that the modern American South sits on ... people in Massachusetts don't feel a connection to the folks who were behind Shay's Rebellion, do they? My PERSONAL OPINION - in a perfect world - would be that we should move on from the Civil War and wipe anything glorifying the Confederacy from public grounds. Another thing that has plssed me off about all of this is the politicization of this debate. Somehow we have allowed there to be a "left" and "right" where there just shouldn't be. "Do you support being overly PC?! If not, you'd sympathize with celebrating Confederate figures." The Confederacy has taken on a "rural, small town, conservative" flavor in the last 30 years that it never (exclusively) had and never should have achieved. When I see "rednecks" in Northern states driving around with Confederate flags, it astounds me. There were plenty of culturally conservative, small town folks who were proudly "country" in Iowa, Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky, Vermont, you name it, who took up arms to fight for their Union in the Civil War. The idea that the Union was some less hokey, less nationalistic, more "progressive" force than the Confederacy is a bastardization of history.
Anyway, end rant: However, all of that is different than supporting people vandalizing these statues or vehemently calling those who oppose their removal - for one reason or another - reflexively racist. If localities want to bring these statues down, they should do so in a lawful manner when public support is behind it.
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