What a week for the local newsman

Date: 8/24/2017

What a week.  I’ll write that again: what a week.

Locally, we are in the governmental doldrums of summer. Various city council and town councils are meeting, but the machinery of government is not in full speed as they will be in just a few weeks.

The biggest political event was Sheriff’s Nick Cocchi’s picnic, a continuation of Sheriff Mike Ashe’s tradition. It proved to be a near seamless transition with the ground of the Springfield Elks Lodge crawling with politicians, candidates and political junkies, as it should.

Working with Focus Springfield, I conducted interviews with folks running for Springfield City Council and School Committee and I’m happy to report – those interviews will be in a later edition – as a Springfield resident I was very impressed with the quality and number of new candidates for these positions. The electorate has some very solid choices for these important jobs.

It gives me hope.

That day and those interviews did take my mind away for a few moments from the new national discussions about race and bigotry. Yes, I’m a staunch believer in the First Amendment, but I also believe in the rule of law.

As difficult as it is to swallow, under our Constitution, if you want be a Nazi, you can in this country. How you exercise your beliefs is a whole different matter.

What has disturbed me the most is how many of my more conservative Facebook friends have either ignored the issues brought up by the events in Virginia or chosen to shift them in a way to further divide this country.

The Southern Poverty law Center has a very interesting paper about monuments to the Confederacy (https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/whoseheritage_splc.pdf) and here is one excerpt from it: “It’s also beyond question that the Confederate flag was used extensively by the Ku Klux Klan as it waged a campaign of terror against African Americans during the civil rights movement and that segregationists in positions of power raised it in defense of Jim Crow. George Wallace, Alabama’s governor, unfurled the flag above the state Capitol in 1963 shortly after vowing  “segregation forever.” In many other cases, schools, parks and streets were named for Confederate icons during the era of white resistance to equality.”

Too many of my FB friends have chosen to pivot on the idea that local governments choosing to remove and relocate statues depicting the heroes of an effort to keep solvent a new country based in part on the idea that slavery was essential is “destroying history.”

History is not being destroyed. I find it ironic that people who have no family ties to the Civil War on the Southern side are now upset that communities are re-thinking the wisdom of having such monuments. Frankly it’s not your issue.

I don’t agree with people who have pulled statues down in the name of political correctness, by the way. The removal of these monuments should be done in an orderly, planned way.

Earlier this summer I visited my grandparent’s graves in an all-white cemetery in a small town in rural Alabama. In this graveyard were the resting places for many of my ancestors, many of who fought for the Confederacy.

On my mother’s side, there is a long line of Texans some of whom also joined the Southern cause. I could be using the argument that this is my “heritage.”

It is only in the strictest sense of history. I was raised by a son of the South who rejected such notions of racism. There was no room in our household for those kinds of beliefs. Heritage is frequently what you make of it in order to be more comfortable with your own prejudices.

Let me be explicit: History must be taught and not forgotten. A statue, though, is not history. The racial and ethnic conflict of this country from the time of the revolution to the present requires discussion and awareness. Yes, it is difficult to resolve the contradictions of someone such as Thomas Jefferson, for instance; a slave owner who was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. It is only through an active acknowledgment of our past and how we can learn from it that we can make our present live up to the promise of the American republic.

We have a lot of work to do.