Posted on 02/25/2005 10:16:03 AM PST by Publius
At least it's a civil war.
"Let me put it gently: Have you lost your mind?" reader Richard Curtis queried after Monday's column on the vandalizing of a Seattle cemetery monument to local veterans of the Civil War who later helped build this state.
Veterans of the Civil War who fought on the side of the South, that is.
Why, Curtis wondered, should we feel badly that a "monument to racists has been destroyed? A monument to racist scum who went off to fight for an evil system? The notion is obscene," he said.
The only thing he and scores of others found disturbing was that such a "vile" monument could stand so long before getting the whupping it deserved.
"Why, in the year 2005, should we even need to remind each other to accept people? To just let them be who they are with nobody thinking they are more or less than another?" countered James X. DeDonato, born and raised right here for 52 years.
"We are a great nation because of our shared history, our differences and our ability to unite as one," he said.
The gray and the blue may have melded into the red states and blue, but we're still a nation divided, and a city, too.
Despite President Lincoln's call to bind up the wounds, both sides still bleed even way up here in the northernmost corner of the Northwesternmost of the lower 48 states, it seems.
After tool-armed and methodical vandals brought a ladder, hacksaws and probably a truck two weeks ago to dismember the graveside Confederate memorial in Lakeview Cemetery, I talked to Marjorie Reeves. She's a polite if currently distraught Alabama transplant who is the Seattle president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Robert E. Lee Chapter 885. And she told me she was praying for the recovery of bronze artwork that was sawed and hammered from the 14-foot-high marker placed here 89 years ago by state and city fathers to commemorate the burial site.
It was placed to honor the dead, not to glorify or celebrate the Confederacy. Certainly not to literally whitewash the cancer that was slavery -- a cancer whose poisonous legacy still infects us.
But what did we think, I wondered, about the fact that -- 140 years after the Civil War and 89 years after the memorial's dedication -- a private cemetery tribute to Southern-born Confederate vets and their wives had been defaced, its artwork carted off in the night?
The candid comments that followed are exactly what we've been aiming for with years of polite forums on race that, at least in my own experience, have been so cautious that, between bites of salad, nobody dared to gnaw to the bone.
Now you're talking and the next step is to swallow and listen to each other's pain.
Civil War re-enactor Mark Terry of Bothell is one of the few who wrote to say it's high time to honor both sides. And he has.
"For years," he said, "I spent part of my Memorial Day holiday at Lakeview Cemetery honoring the few who are buried in that place beneath the memorial. We would then move to the GAR (Grand Army of the Republic) Cemetery just north of Lakeview to honor in kind the hundreds of Union soldiers buried there.
"As you correctly stated, these memorials are a part of the history of Seattle and it sickens me that someone did this."
Nicole D. Blake, who identified herself as an African American attorney from Auburn, was sickened, too, but only by the fact that what she sees as a symbol of hate could stand so long.
"It would appear that the desecration in question symbolizes the fact that Seattle diversity does not accommodate glorification of the Confederacy. And that would seem to be a good thing," she said. "It's not the desecration but the sentiment: that the Confederacy does not exist anymore and yet is revered like the stench of a long-dead rock star."
Ed Werner was just one who said that, while he does not condone vandalism, "decent people should be more appalled that such a memorial was constructed in the first place."
But Annette Dantzler was one of an equal number to say, "Every inch of America has been fought for by someone's family. Just because we don't agree with someone does not mean that they should not be proud of their heritage."
And Ruth Mallonee, while a Daughter of the Confederacy, has discovered she has two Union soldiers in her ancestry, too. And monuments to her kin on either side deserve respect, she says.
In this weeks' hubbub over the proposal to slice Washington state in half, separating east from west, prime sponsor Sen. Bob Morton of Orient said, "It's common sense. People who think alike should be united."
But what if people who do not think alike could unite as well? Now a monument to that is something I would pay to see.
I agree with most of what you say. I will say, however, that many overlook the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free ONE slave in the Union slave states. Further, slavery was made an issue only when it was feared that Europe would become involved. The leftist professors have done one hell of a job revising history in many respects .... and they still have a hold on many here on the FR! Sad, but true. The politically correct stance on this issue is to demonize all things Confederate. A true student of history sees things differently however.
Seattle scum and Yankee filth go hand in hand.
As your last paragraph shows, the left uses linguistics to gain and keep power. Once that is achieved there is little need to go to the trouble of "systematic exclusion" through linguistics. Then it is done by force.
May I disagree? I think Lincoln had the total abolition of slavery by any means necessary on his mind for quite some time.
This is where I disagree with the "Lincoln was a moderate", "Lincoln was an opportunist" crowds. He conceived, IMHO, a plan when the Republican Party was still out of power, and he executed it during the course of the 1860 campaign and the descent into war, to go outside the Constitution and impose the solution that, in his letters, he had concluded in 1855 could not be achieved by legal means within the Constitution.
IOW, Lincoln started the war in the first place, and he made sure it looked like the damn Rebels did it -- like that immortal movie line of George C. Scott's.
Lincoln was going to send them all to Liberia.
Nonsense.
I can provide more sources to educate you if you would like.
Yeah, I've read them all. But unlike you I've gone further and read Lincoln's speeches and writings on the subject in context. Lincoln was a believer in voluntary colonization, emphasis on the voluntary. No secret there. Colonization plans enjoyed widespread support for decades before the rebellion, and in his support for colonization Lincoln was no different than men like Robert Lee, who paid passage to Liberia for some of his former slaves. But Lincoln was different from men like Lee, who believed that slavery was the best place for blacks and his support for voluntary colonization is a far cry from your claim that Lincoln was for forced deportation. In that you're confusing Lincoln with Jefferson Davis.
I'm sure this hammerhead flies the Hammer and Sickle over his property.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.