I’ve had it with the people who choose to be offended by the symbols and memorabilia from the nation’s past.
First it was Confederate flags. Now monuments and statues have to go. What’s next? The carving at Stone Mountain? Oh yeah, now someone wants that wiped out!
What the hell is wrong with us? Have we lost all sense of reason, all common sense? There’s no erasing history. Our children have only cursory knowledge of it today. “The past cannot be cured,” said Queen Elizabeth in the 16th century. Philosopher George Santayana penned the most famous quote warning against tossing out history, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
The absurdity of the attempt to erase the past was never more apparent than in Henry County this year. It was reported a Henry County Commissioner — on behalf of a constituent, she says — complained about the flying of the Confederate flag outside a Confederate museum in a house on a Civil War battleground — land owned by the county. So the museum owners took it down. Then the commissioner complained that the flags in the window were visible from the distant roadway and asked that they be removed. That was it for the owners. They shut down the museum. Couldn’t the complainers have just found another route?
Do you imagine as the museum curator Bill Dodd noted, that there are no Nazi flags at the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington? How about the National Museum of African American History and Culture? I’ll just bet you’ll find in more than one exhibit Kente cloth, featuring the red, black and green colors that adorn flags of many African nations. What if white people decide Kente cloth — popularly worn by African-Americans at graduation ceremonies — should be banned? What if extremists decide the statues of Civil Rights heroes are offensive to them and should come down?
We are living in dangerous, kooky times, but it has nothing to do with Confederate statues or flags or museums. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. must have passed quite a few on his way to Washington, D.C. in 1968. But his eyes, mind and heart were on the bigger picture. To be “offended” by what someone has flying in his or her yard, or in a museum or memorabilia store, or when a white person utters the “N” word, as we now ridiculously say (as if a word can do you harm), is infantile and petty.
What happened to these other people’s free-speech rights? I can’t think of a better way to alienate and drive blacks and whites further apart than perpetually asking others to change themselves to make yourself feel better. What if they’re offended by dreadlocks, or corn-row braids or rap music? Are you going to stop wearing them, or listening to that?
Here, by the way, in no particular order, is what offends me:
- Violent home invasions, robberies and carjackings in which metro Atlantans are murdered senselessly every single day, and the nightly TV news parade of mug shots of those responsible;
We’re never going to convert the 10 to 15 percent of folks in America who hate black people. They aren’t the majority anymore, far from it. So, let the bigots hold their marches. When there’s no one there, they’ll do what they always have — retreat until the next generation of racists appears. They’re right about the statues and monuments, though. After you tear them down, then what? Trump will still be president and all you’ve done is create turmoil where none was necessary.
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