Spin

With everyone fighting over statues and monuments…perhaps we should take a hard look at the elephant in the room. It isn’t entirely racism and it isn’t about loss of heritage or erasing history. It is about spin.

My parents were history fans, especially my dad. Our Summer vacations meant trips to the battlefields, monuments, and Southern historical sites like Monticello and the USS North Carolina. They dragged us around the region to anything and everything they could show us...along with lessons about what these places meant to both sides.

To this day, I love history and deeply believe that we need to remember our history so we can learn, heal and measure our progress forward. So, when the issue of confederate monuments first came up, I was on the fence. As an artist, as a history buff, as a Southerner, as an American and as a compassionate human I wondered how we should handle these statues, if removal was for better or worse. Then I started reading.

Innate curiosity meant that my understanding of our history only deepened after graduation. Howard Zinn and James Loewen shone light on the rewriting of history that took place long before I opened my first book. Recently, despite wild rants from both extremes, I have learned even more about the true history of a treasonous war that pitted brother against brother…and of the monuments left in its wake.

It is more politically correct to think the Civil War was about states’ rights but, if you read the actual declarations of secession, it is clear that the Southern states were fighting to keep slavery. Why is that? A relatively small portion of Southerners were slave owners (estimates vary between 20 and 32% overall, less in some states more in others), so why did so many join the fight for the rights of comparatively few?

The majority of Southern whites did not own slaves and many were against it. So why were they willing to die, to fight, even against their own families, to protect slavery? Spin. The rich slave owners told them that they would lose their jobs, their land, their homes and their way of life to blacks if the North won and slaves were freed. 

Sound familiar?

It wasn’t just the slaveowners, either. Southern religious leaders threw in to the mix. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, claimed that slavery “has received the sanction of Jehova.” Southern Baptist Reverend Richard Furman taught that the holy scriptures sanctioned the right to hold slaves and that “every Negro…will be the equal of every one of you. If you are tame enough to submit, abolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.” Pastor Dunwoody of South Carolina said “god has authorized the practice of slavery…therefore, slavery is not a moral evil.” Presbyterian Robert Lewis Dabney told his fellow clergy to use the Bible to explain slavery. “We must go before the nation with the Bible as the text, and ‘thus sayeth the lord’ as the answer…the abolition party will be driven to unveil their true infidel tendencies.” 


Again, sound familiar?

THIS is why we need history…so it does not repeat itself.

That said, we do NOT need revisionist or apologist history. We need to understand the real reasons why countless Americans died to protect the rights of the wealthiest among them and how that relates to what is happening right now. We need history so we can look critically at the motives behind our current political and spiritual leaders, so we can learn to recognize who actually benefits when we are being played against one another.

Many of the monuments in question were created not to honor, but to divide. They were built so people would continue to rally behind a false ideal…against their neighbors, their family and their fellow Americans. When we fight over monuments that were purposely created to further divisiveness, we only deepen the divide…even worse, we miss what is really going on.

While people come to blows over statues, our REAL, irreplaceable monuments and natural resources are under fire. While we call one another names, laws are being created to take away what we have worked for and put it into the pockets of a very few. While some lobby for walls to keep out the workers who do the jobs we don’t even want, the jobs we DO want are being sent overseas by corporations. While Americans complain about a minuscule percentage of our tax dollar going to programs for healthcare, arts, education…a large portion of our tax dollar goes to corporate subsidies and monumental tax breaks for the wealthiest few.

Americans worry so much about the threat of “others”…other religions, other races, other ideologies. In fact, we are our own worst enemies. We fight amongst ourselves rather than coming together to create something better. If Americans supported our own, if we voted for laws that helped small businesses to succeed rather than supporting subsidies for corporations, everyone would be better off. If we open our hearts and borders to the immigrants that have been the very fabric of our nation since the beginning, we are ALL better off. If we supported programs that give opportunities to people who have few or none, it would lift us ALL up. If we supported education to raise standards rather than lazily grading to the lowest common denominator, we would ALL benefit.

We need to stop pampering our delicate egos and look at EXACTLY why that war happened, to understand its true history rather than the spin. We need to be outraged by how we are being similarly manipulated to this day. It isn’t the Mexicans, Jews, Blacks, LGBTQ, Muslims or any other “OTHER” that threaten our way of life, it isn’t the wealthy, either…it is our own refusal and/or inability to convert lessons from our own history into critical thinking regarding the manner in which we live, learn and VOTE.