I had purposely left Charlottesville off this blog because I wanted to gather my reasoned thoughts together so any opinion over which there is a good number thereof is considered.
To me there are two aspects around this discourse, the reaction on the day and subsequent actions and statements.
I might begin with what may be obvious to some and not to others which is I am not an American, I have not lived in your society and by definition have an outsiders vantage point.
We may as well go back to a part of this discourse that matters, that triggered a strong emotional response from people of differing points of view because to an extent, they colour all else that has happened since.
The catalyst in this is the proposition that statues of people erected who fought for the Confederacy such as Robert E Lee be removed from public spaces because as we are all only too painfully away the Confederacy allowed and supported the right to own slaves and whose treatment was based on racial inequality something that remains a running sore in the South.
To those who understandably oppose such sentiments the continued presence of them they are seen as not so much commemorating the Civil War but celebrating the Confederacy and a rallying point for those who hold those views.
Others feel notwithstanding their preference for the statutes not have been commissioned in the first place, that it is a remind of a historic factual event that morever may cause people to think about why the Civil War as bloody as it was, was necessary and why racist attitudes are wrong-headed.
Another question to ask is should a State have the power to remove any public moment that reflects its past especially in a light it seeks to move away from?
My feeling is actually one of we learn from the past and that learning is what helps us prevent the same mistakes occurring, the political liberty and autonomy of the constitution that the Southern States had a right to was bought at the cost in part to the liberty of what we call today African-American slaves who were denied theirs. The Civil War settled that not that North was free from discrimination itself I would add.
Four miles from my home there are two monuments originally destroyed by people who opposed a religious past of our town who only accepted one view point erasing all they disagreed with and repaired and put right centuries later as part of the past in the spirit of tolerance and respect for the past. This happened during our civil war.
It has a very profound message not lost on my people.
You need to remember your past, that how things are seen does change and the existence of reminders prompts intelligent debate from which all including the many wrongs are understood and addressed in way that removal does not.
Few, perhaps rightly would call for those statues to built today and for understandable reasons although the civil war and its local impact should be marked for all of you but as they are there now, far from removing them you need to use them constructively so the attitudes behind them are discussed and wrongs such as slavery are acknowledged.
To deny your history does no one any good long term.
The second is what happened was wrong, mowing down people leaving one fatality, the use of armed militias uniformed and carrying weapons in public does not have the moral equivalence of pushing forward, at times aggressively with banners. It goes way beyond that into a threat (implied if not necessary acted upon) of violence and life-taking.
Put plainly it simply were never ever be permitted here nor in most English speaking democracies.
Much of the widespread bi-partisan criticism of President Trump, revolves around that and his failure to be at least sufficiently clear that those actions and that incident where on person lost their lives could not and should be condoned and that was not conditional to his points around the States attempt to remove the moment and the right of peaceful protest by all.
They are separate.
