In Season

Let me start by saying that I don’t have a problem with the removal of statues of Confederate military and political figures and related symbols of the Old South. To everything there is a season, and that season is here. .

You may hear a “but” coming. Let’s stipulate, as the lawyers say, that I’m using the word because I’m white, but there’s a little more to it.

I guess what concerns me is the level of demonization in the air. Pulling down statues doesn’t seem like enough for some people. Those who were on those pedestals are called losers and traitors. By extension, that means those whose culture honors them as well.

I wonder if every Confederate general fought in the Civil War specifically to preserve slavery. How about the average foot soldier, who died at Shiloh or Antietam? When he charged to his death, screaming the Rebel yell, was it  in the name of slavery? More likely, he was fighting for his home, his family, and his way of life, which indeed had been built on slavery. That part was probably not top-of-mind for him. Maybe that made it even worse.

I am not apologizing for anyone here. What I am saying is that by raising fists and shouting in someone’s face that their culture is built on a falsehood is not apt to instantly change a mind.

Black people may say, we’ve been waiting 400 years for white people to get it, and we’re out of patience. But changing hearts and minds takes time, as wars have taught us. A natural solution is for those incapable of change to die off. But the living will have to be persuaded. For them, it’s not an epiphany but a process. Change is not impossible. George Wallace, one of the most virulent Southern racists of the last century, did come to the light in later life. It just took him a while.

There are many wrongs to be righted, and Black people are not the only victims. But speaking just for myself, repeatedly telling me that I owe something to someone for centuries of oppression won’t work. I’m not into guilt trips.

When it comes to righting wrongs, the Founding Fathers, flawed as we now understand they were, did manage to leave us pretty good road maps for cleaning up the messes we’re in, like the Declaration of Independence. This and other iconic documents of that era contain what we really should be honoring this time of year. In the end, the people on pedestals and the names on buildings are secondary. Let’s read those road maps and follow them. They will take us where we need to go.

The Garden of Good and Evil

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 28^th 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.

Red Flag

Following a short social media post I made about the Confederate flag, a friend, who is not African-American, commented that for her, the flag has always symbolized hate and bigotry. Well, that wasn’t always the way it was for me, and I suspect I am not alone.

To me, as I said in the post, the Confederate flag was always a fun, quirky Southern thing. You could see it at high school football games. One of its most famous uses was being painted on the hood of the General Lee, the iconic car in “The Dukes of Hazzard.” That was a popular TV show once. I had no idea that if I watched it, saw the car and smiled or laughed, I was supporting bigotry and hatred.

The Civil War, as many writers have pointed out, was more than just about slavery. It was about states’ rights in general – their ability to decide what was legal within their boundaries, and supporters even used the U.S. Constitution to back this right. Was every Confederate soldier fighting to support slavery? Was every Union soldier fighting to abolish slavery? I don’t think so.

I’m sure all of us know a Civil War buff, somebody who can tell you the name of every general that fought in every battle, and where all the battles were fought. In many parts of the country, there are Civil War re-enactments every summer. If the Civil War was just about slavery, does that mean our friend the “buff” has turned an atrocity into a hobby, and the re-enactors have turned it into a game?

I was always a little scared of handling the American flag because of all the lore associated with it. At summer camp, when it was my job sometimes to raise and lower it, I was mortally afraid of dropping it. I thought if it touched the ground you were supposed to burn it because you had desecrated it by being careless. But in the ‘60s, the American flag meant something else to many people. Vietnam War protesters burned it. Some people wore it on the seat of their jeans. To them, it represented policies they disapproved of.

Fast forward to the South Carolina situation today. The Confederate flag has flown over the state capitol and other public facilities, and now there’s a demand it be removed. It seems the Republicans are being dragged kicking and screaming into supporting this view since the AME church massacre, and now “Should the flag come down?” is a litmus-test question for Presidential candidates.

It could very well be argued that the young man who shot up the Charleston church and killed nine people, in one single action, drastically narrowed the meaning of the Confederate flag. It’s now all about bigotry and oppression. Perhaps it has been for a long time for African-Americans; the rest of us may be slower to catch on, and we can only ask forgiveness.

But a flag is only a symbol, like a word. The meanings of words can change over time. If this is what has happened here, we have no choice but to demand that the Confederate flag be removed from our national consciousness. All I’m saying is that it hasn’t always meant what it now means, here in the summer of 2015.