A Marbled Beef (or the Radical Left Misplays the Whole Statue Thing)

All too typically, the constructive work lately done in this country by the left has been co-opted in a self-defeating way by their radicals. I applaud the mostly peaceful “Black Lives Matter” protests of recent weeks. After decades of inexcusable mistreatment of black people at the hands of police, white America (including me) has finally begun to wake up to the injustice of the situation

I understand and can relate to people wanting to remove Confederate monuments or wanting to rename military bases named after Confederate generals. The Confederates were enemies of this country and killed American soldiers. We may as well name an army base after Hitler or one of his henchmen.

To the extent that people believe it represents their heritage – for starters, the Confederacy isn't a heritage. As the meme goes, it wasn't like hundreds of years of Irish heritage in which generations of your family occupied a land and built a culture. It was five years of rebellion against America. That's what the Confederate flag represents. The lifestyle that rebellion defended was built upon the ownership of other human beings – a lifestyle that was objectively wrong and was rightly stamped out. To those who want to propagate the canard that the Civil War was about “state's rights” – sorry, those rights were first and foremost about owning other human beings and were therefore illegitimate.

That having been said, if the radical left wants to destroy statues of Washington or Jefferson (as they have), their strategy is misguided. Yes, those men owned slaves. But one has to look at the long continuum of human freedom and accomplishment to gain proper perspective. Of course they had flaws. But on that continuum, they marked nodes of advancement that brought us to such enlightenment as we have today. One can't pretend that they can be held to a standard of perfection that they only began to understand in their own time. What we should try to realize – without convicting our forebears with modern values they can't have fully understood – is that without their contributions, we wouldn't have the values we so cavalierly assume would be ours without them.