In an America where roiling anger is a new national pastime, it can seem that counterproductive confrontation has stomped into rubble old societal building blocks of civility, respect and collaboration.
That’s certainly the case on a myriad of current issues that divide us into predictable camps that are often hostile to differing views.
What’s more astounding, and indicative of the deep chasms that separate us as an American people, is the closed-ears debate – and even sporadic physical battles — that’ve never ended over a war that ceased more than 150 years ago with Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Union forces at Appomattox, Virginia.
Metro Atlanta, and Georgia, are nowhere near immune to continuing collateral damage from the ongoing civil skirmishes over how to best recognize the legacy of the War Between the States. Indeed, with the world’s largest monument to the failed Confederacy residing in DeKalb County, our juxtaposition on this issue is perhaps unique.
We believe the lessons that metro Atlanta courageously taught the entire world during the Civil Rights movement can serve us well today in traveling toward a positive reconciliation on this matter – one that will neither whitewash the past’s atrocities, evade painful truths or disallow honest discussion of a war that killed as many as 700,000 Americans.
The old Confederacy, its monuments and their place in the modern world came to mind recently as metro Atlanta dodged a bullet last month after a small collection of neo-Nazis and other disaffected, alt-right, white-supremacist types came to Newnan to stage a rally.
Peace-loving people here of all colors and affiliations were rightfully concerned, given that a similar gathering turned deadly last year in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Thankfully, the Newnan rally and protests were relatively peaceful, thanks in part to sound planning and good police work by a heavy contingent of peace officers.
As Newnan quickly returned to its normal calm, thoughts naturally turned east to Stone Mountain, home of both a beautiful park used daily by a rainbow coalition of people and its epic-scale, controversial memorial carved into stone by Georgia as a monumental thumbing of the nose toward the Union cause.
Given its prominence, Stone Mountain has seen its share of divisive history, from its site as the rebirth of the modern Ku Klux Klan a century ago, to a 2016 white supremacist rally that saw police scuffling with counterprotesters on the park grounds.
In recent years, political leaders ranging from Gov. Nathan Deal to, more recently, DeKalb County Chief Executive Michael L. Thurmond have proposed paths forward based on offering context and interpretation of such monuments to the past. Making sense of yesterday’s sentiments and actions through the lens of today’s sensibilities seems the best way to inform people about painful, often-bloody history while ensuring that tangible reminders of painful yesterdays don’t disappear from the public space. For it is true that to forget history is to get on track to repeat it.
CEO Thurmond on this page today reminds us that evidence points toward recent Russian involvement in using modern social media tools to stoke old coals of racial discord, and racism. That was the case at the Stone Mountain 2016 melee, and likely elsewhere.
We as Americans should be better than to fall for such time-dishonored tactics of divide and conquer. Metro Atlantans, and Georgians, more than others, should realize the awful toll of suffering that the Civil War, Reconstruction and a legacy of often-violent incidents around race since then have exacted from all of us.
In a 2014 panel discussion at the old Cyclorama, Christy Coleman, an African-American woman who’s CEO of the American Civil War Museum, put the debate over controversial history into a powerful context worth repeating here: “When we think back on what we remember, we should remember every single bit of it.”
Historian Coleman recited a list of experiences and changes wrought by the Civil War. “These are the lessons that really allow us to build the American character,” she said.
She is correct, we believe. The old tombstones of the Confederacy’s defeated ideals can still have a place in the pantheon of modern history, if they are interpreted with truthful fidelity through today’s ideals rather than remaining as one-sided markers to a dead cause and the mythology it fed.
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