PC Gone Too Far

Hi, Paul. So, the topic isn't the cause of the Civil War, but I feel like your view on this issue is too rigid and oversimplified. There's a lot of socio-political nuance to the Civil War, and I don't think this sort of "bottom line" thinking is a fair way to treat our history. Obviously, slavery was the trigger of the war, but distilling the Civil War down to one modern moral principle and insisting that everything about the Civil War be interpreted as a symbol of that one principle is terribly unfair to people for whom it has much more personal significance.I lived my teenage years as a "Yankee" Midwesterner in Tennessee. I had a lot of bitterness about the way this topic was treated there. But, one of the phrases I heard a lot was that the Civil War was "a rich man's war, but a poor man's fight." Most Southerners' ancestors were the poor people who did the fighting, rather than the rich men who wanted to keep their slaves. They see their personal ancestors as poor farmers who answered the call to serve their country and defend their homes. The fact that the call to arms was a deliberate pretense for some rich man's cause of maintaining slavery makes it doubly tragic and difficult to accept, so they're highly susceptible to these alternate theories about the war (that's my unprofessional assessment, of course).But, isn't there still something noble about a poor man answering the call to duty, even when you consider the overarching socio-political context of the Civil War? Isn't that what this monument is memorializing? Isn't that an appropriate thing to memorialize?The removal of a monument under this pretext is basically telling Southerners that it's inappropriate to publicly remember their ancestors as anything but symbols of bigotry. I don't think that's fair to them, and I don't think it's giving due reverence to the complexities of human conflict.

This news article says the removal of the monument is being subject to a legal challenge now:

quote:

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Jefferson County Circuit Judge Judith McDonald-Burkman issued [a temporary restraining order] against Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer and the metro area's government, preventing them from moving, disassembling or otherwise tampering with the monument...

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...The Sons of Confederate Veterans and Everett Corley, a Republican running for Congress, filed for the restraining order on Monday. They contended that the mayor lacks the authority to remove the monument and did not follow proper protocol.

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Hi, NoNukes. I don't think so. I never visited the site when I lived in Kentucky, but these were the only placards I could find pictures or descriptions of online: It's not a tribute to the Confederate cause. It's not a tribute to the political and military leaders of the South who championed the cause. It's specifically a tribute to the soldiers who fought and died on their home soil.----- That leads me to the question of why it should be moved. If placement doesn't matter, I advocate inertia as the deciding factor. Any other action clearly says that placement does, in fact, matter.And, apparently, the reason why it matters is because it's politically incorrect to publicly memorialize Southerners' ancestors as anything but symbols of bigotry.

Hi, NoNukes. I don't know why they care, because I'm not a person who particularly cares personally about Confederate monuments. It doesn't matter to me. Pragmatism matters to me. I advocate neutrality, and I argue that neutrality is best represented by inertia: only take action when compelling justification is given; otherwise, don't change anything.If Party A wants the statue moved, then the onus is on Party A to justify this action. There is no onus on any other party. It's a "burden of proof"/"innocent until proven guilty" sort of thing.In this case, it feels like Party A has successfully shifted the burden of proof to someone else by doing little more than saying, "I am offended by it and the Confederacy was evil."That's not much of a "burden" of proof, if you ask me: it's not really even an "inconvenience" of proof. I don't feel like shifting the burden of proof should ever be that simple.I guess I just want to know that the system is actually making careful and empirical decisions, and not just responding to the fickle whims of whatever social movement happens to be in vogue this political season.