Recently a meme was shared on Facebook that said, "History is not there for you to like or dislike. It is there for you to learn from it. And if it offends you, then even better. Because then you are less likely to repeat it. It is not yours to erase. It belongs to all of us."
This is an incredibly true statement.
History is beautiful and ugly as it encompasses everything a community or country does, whether we agree with it or not. The United States has had some incredibly beautiful moments in history mixed with dark overtones, such as slavery and the Civil War.
Those dark overtones have been some of the ugliest parts of our history, but there is a host of issues that many people have forgotten about. Issues such as the abominable treatment of the Chinese that occurred in the late 19th century and well into the 20th century. Or lest we forget the Irish and other immigrants who migrated to this country in the mid-19th century and were not treated much better than slaves. The only difference was they were free, but their living and employment conditions were horrible. Immigrants lived in overcrowded sections of large cities, where unsafe housing and work conditions existed. Many were killed on the job, including women and children — children who were forced to work rather than go to school because of the extreme poverty they experienced.
There are those in this community who will say you can’t compare the two because one set of people were slaves, owned by others, and our country was torn asunder because white people wanted to keep the Black man enslaved so much they fought a war over it. Those folks would be partially right. You cannot compare the plight of people who were denied their freedom to those who had their freedom.
However, the only key difference is slavery. Both groups of people suffered in abominable conditions and frankly there were some black slaves that lived better and were treated better than the immigrant, but that is perspective. Perspective is something that is lacking today.
There are no large monuments to those immigrants scattered all over the North and South; they did not matter as their sacrifice was nothing more than the building of a great country.
When our Confederate memorials were erected, it was initially so that the Southern community could honor and remember their loved ones who had fought and died for a cause they believed in but in reality was dead on arrival because it was based on the enslavement of a group of people, unlike our American Revolution, which was based on the principles of equality and freedom for all men.
We remember the Civil War because of those monuments and no matter how hurtful it is to any particular group or individual, we must remember that dark time in our history so it is not repeated. The people who erected those monuments do not exist anymore, just as no person who was a slave as it existed in our country prior to 1865 exist today. But that doesn’t mean we tear the monument down or run around crying about how it victimizes us. Instead use them as teaching tools, to tell the current and next generations about a time in history we do not want to return to.
The idea that statutes, kept in their original locations, be used as a teaching tool seems to be very controversial for some people. Instead, there are cries for relocating them to a museum or destroying them all together. It is juvenile to not see the bigger picture in the value of keeping those monuments in their current locations. Many children, and adults for that matter, do not go to museums, so how are they going to see it? How do you know it is going to be put on display? And even if it is displayed at a museum, how long will it take for some individual to be offended, victimized or feel oppressed because they walked by a display about slavery?
Let’s compromise on this issue and instead of removing the monument put a plaque next to it telling its history and how we feel about the issue today and the most important reason why we do not remove it. That reason being because we do not want to forget one of the darkest moments in our history so that we do not repeat.
Upon the liberation of the concentration camps enacted by the Nazi’s during World War II, General Eisenhower ordered videos and pictures to be taken of the prisoners and camp conditions, including the dead bodies, crematoriums and piles of personal items left behind when men brutalized and killed other men over religious beliefs.
The general said, "The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where (there) were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit (to Gotha, Germany) deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’"
We have very little visual evidence of the brutality of slavery — there is some out there but it is rarely shared in the classroom, so let’s use our monuments instead to teach rather than hide this period of our history, or as Eisenhower said, "develop a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’"
Dianna Greenwood is the outgoing chairwoman of the Bastrop County Republican Party.