Erasing uncomfortable history is inappropriate

According to a recent CNN Poll, 57 percent of Americans see the Confederate flag as a symbol of Southern pride. Regardless of how you feel, you can’t just rewrite or remove history that makes you uncomfortable or offended. Should we remove all the World War II history and that of the extermination of over 6 million Jews by the Nazis because it is uncomfortable to our Jewish brethren? Actually, the Jewish people have handled the Holocaust properly. They constantly remind us what can happen when good men do nothing and allow evil to occur.

We can’t just remove from history all the actions that were horrific or wrong. You would think that the minority in the South would want to remind people what can happen when good men do nothing and are allowed to treat human beings as bad as we treated the slaves in this country.

Unfortunately, what happened by removing the Confederate Flag just opened the floodgates for the rewriting or elimination of history that makes us uncomfortable. Georgetown University was started by Jesuit Priests. An alumnus researched the school’s history and found that the two priests who started Georgetown also sold slaves in order to pay off the debt of the University. This was in 1838 when slavery was not only an accepted practice, but encouraged by Southern landowners. Several buildings on the campus were dedicated to these two priests. Because of pressure from a small minority, the names of these priests were removed from all the buildings and history of the university.

Now students at Ole Miss want the Confederate Flag removed from their university flag. Here in Atlanta, we have Stone Mountain. It’s kind of like a Southern Mount Rushmore. On it are carvings of three Southern heroes of the Civil War. There have been attempts to have the carvings removed, or at least add a memorial to an African-American hero like Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

As good of a man as Martin Luther King Jr. was, he was not involved, nor did he have anything to do with the Civil War. We must stop people from trying to rewrite history to a narrative that they are comfortable with.

In addition, our country is dealing with some serious issues; Wage stagflation, income inequality, absence of quality medical care, hunger, poverty, etc. And yet the politicians are debating what bathrooms transgender individuals can use. Members of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community make up about 2.3 percent of the U.S. population.

Several states have tried to pass legislation that would protect the religious populace from having to perform ceremonies involving the LGBT community. The backlash was immediate and serious. Our Georgia governor crumbled when the NFL told him that they would never let Atlanta host a Super Bowl as long as a law like this was on the books.

Since when do we as Americans let large corporations or liberal Hollywood decide what laws we will and will not pass?

Seventy percent of Americans identify themselves as Christian. How long are we going to sit around and let our rights be trampled on by a small minority of the population?

I can’t sit still any longer.