. . . and I'm not sure I disagree. Leave up the Confederate statues; make sure they are tagged with a scarlet "R" and cloaked in shame, so that all know the horror which spawned this country.
The first thing that happened when W's posse seized Baghdad was that the statues of Saddam came down . . . we all saw it on TV, and I'm sure more than a few ran through the streets of their town waving American flags and crying "wooo-hooo" in celebration. For its part, Russia has been a veritable parade of statues going up and down in the twentieth century . . . and so it goes, and so it has gone pretty much all the way through history.
Here it is 2017, and we are still arguing about goddamn statues that should have been down by May of 1865 (not that these civil war statues are really civil war artifacts - they were actually erected much later to remind all those uppity black folk who was really in charge). Robert E. Lee should have been carted away from Appomattox to prison, or at least forced to trudge home without sword and steed. The stars -n- bars should have been trampled underfoot from coast to coast, and relegated to the back shelves of obscure museums, instead of the bumpers of jacked up pickups and rusted Saturns nationwide.
But they were allowed to stand, and where they are, they should remain, spray painted red as blood. They remain as the ashes on the forehead of our nation, the outward sign of our inward doom: remember, from racism you came, in racism you live, from racism you shall die.
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