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.
"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."
These two a$$clowns are the only "symbols of hate" in this article.
Political correctness is another part of the left's strategy. The purpose: To establish a uniformity of thought that is established by the state. Once thought becomes equal and bland, and differing opinions subject to legal consequences, the rest is easy.
I bet both of them would be more than honored to be a part of a committee to erect a statue of Kurt Cobain in memory of the drug addled musician who blew his brains out. Seattle's honored son.
"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."
Oh, my bad, Ms. Blake. I didn't realize at first that you were talking about Seattle diversity (as opposed to diversity).
Having attended UW during the mid 1970's (in the rain capital of the continental United States, I might add), I found out about Seattle diversity. It was not then and still is not one bit different from the exclusionary socialist politically correct prejudice infecting liberals generally and the Democratic Party in particular.
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.
"The Principles of Newspeak"
An appendix to 1984
Written by : George Orwell in 1948
Eat. Sh**. Yankee. Filth.
If someone destroyed a monument to Mr. Lincoln, would Mr. Curtis feel the same way? Lincoln was obviously a racist. Are Mr. Curtis's standards to be applied to ALL racists? Somehow I think NOT!
BTTT
I've got no use for the Confederacy. But people like this guy fail to distinguish between the aims of the Confederacy and the aims of the Confederate soldier. I believe the Confederacy was bad, yet many of the Confederate soldiers fought for what they thought were noble aims. I had a GGGreat Uncle who turned against slavery for religious reasons, freed his slaves and gave them land to get started in freedom in the 1850s. Yet years later due to regional loyalty, he fought for the Confederacy. And this while some very prominent Union figures remained slave owners.
Too bad people like the haters in Seattle can't rise up to the "malice toward none" sentiment of the great Lincoln. As Jesus said: "Let him that is without sin cast the first stone".
*dixie-ping*
Prayers for my friend, known here as Henry Lee II, and the ignorant in Seattle.
Only because there is a class of people among us who would find themselves unemployed if the cancer was allowed to be cured.
She shouldn't be so tough on Jimi Hendrix.
Fortunately, more research and discussion have shown that the kind of systematic exclusion of uncontrolled thoughts and undesirable intellectual processes aimed at (no, really, they really have!) by 20th-century totalitarians is actually not achievable. As long as noun-subjects have verbs that take an object, constructions of the form "Big Brother eats [insert favorite scatological category]" will always be possible.
The Russian Communists, on the eve of the October Revolution, spent all night arguing about what to call the ministries they were about to take over. Having spent a generation demonizing them in Communist propaganda, the Bolsheviks had to find a way to force people to think of the selfsame "organs" in a positive way after the Reds took them over.
Richard Curtis - Brainwashed by a lefty college prof and spouting crap he knows nothing about!
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