By now, we know what the acronym PC means. To start with,
it’s the thing I’m typing this post on – but you know what I’m talking about:
Political Correctness. Inoffensive ways of saying, doing, or demonstrating things.
Disabilities being renamed “challenges,” you know the drill. But then there is
the revision, or more precisely, the suppression, of history. Removing the
statues of former heroes who turned out to be bad guys. The late Penn State
football coach Joe Paterno is one of the best examples, for his perceived cover-up
of child sex abuse. The number of winning football seasons, and the prestige and
money he brought to the university, became secondary. As for the living, Bill
Cosby is being stripped of an honorary degree because of the numerous
drug-date-rapes he is accused of. The comedy albums that made millions laugh
will stay in the back of the record cabinet (do you even have a “record
cabinet”?).
This week, though, it hit closer to home for me. An
organization of students wants Princeton University to make the name Woodrow
Wilson go away. Wilson was the 28th president of the United States,
but before that, he was governor of New Jersey and the president of Princeton,
where I went in the last century. But he was a racist. He supported
segregation. His favorite movie was “Birth of a Nation.” But President Wilson also supported women’s
suffrage. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his sponsorship of the League of
Nations, a precursor to the U.N. One of the most prestigious schools of
international affairs at Princeton bears his name, so far, anyway. Oops, but
then there’s the income tax.
OK, so what are we to conclude here? He wasn’t the greatest
president we’ve ever had, but nor was he the worst. He was a human being, full
of contradictions. Thomas Jefferson fathered children with a black slave. Andrew Jackson signed the legislation forcing Indian tribes off their land. But I'm not ready to teer up my $20 bills just yet.
I partly went along with the Confederate flag thing. I agree
that it had no business being on state flag designs or on the flagpoles of
state buildings. But is it only about slavery? Or is the symbolism a little
broader than that in the South? Is it quite the same as the Nazi flag? I’m
supposed to be sure about the answers – but sorry, I’m not.
The Civil War was an awful thing. Hundreds of thousands of young men died. Yet,
Fort Sumter in South Carolina, where the first shot was fired, is a national
monument. A friend who visited there recently told us that the bricks at the
fort were created by black slaves. Civil War battlefields are historic sites
all over the East. Every year, many slightly overweight men try to squeeze into
Union or Confederate uniforms for Civil War reenactments. Almost like it’s a
great big game.
Human history is always about contradictions, because it’s
all about us. Why can’t we get used to that, live with them, and more
importantly, learn from them, instead of fussing quite so much over symbolism? A
black-and-white world is a lot easier to understand and navigate. But it’s just
not the world we live in.
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