February 15th, 2020. Gone South.

Comparisons are hard. And constant. And in today’s world of social media, more and more frequent. FOMO and jealousy, envy, one whole cardinal sin massively bloated by something that now over three quarters of America log into daily. We’re spending the next several days with Kristen’s father and his wife down in rather-rural Waynesboro, Georgia and … I’m not going to get into it on a public forum, but there’s a lot of comparisons.

We’ve spent a bit of time getting out of the house, exploring the little town that we’re on the edge of, going to the local Mennonite bakery, wandering historic sites. I’m glad the weather’s so nice as we can get out and wander and Georgia IS stunning in the spring (ignoring for the moment that February is springtime). Back home I hear the temperature is struggling into the 20s and we hadn’t seen the sun in so long that I’ve yet to test the colour-blind-battlin’ sunglasses my brother sent me for my birthday.

During our explorations we wandered into a Confederate cemetery and explored it at sundown, poking past overgrown paths and wondering what the difference was between the graves that’d received American flags and the ones that’d received Confederate flags. Everything appears run down, rusted and overgrown, the flags faded and some of the graves obviously vandalized. I wonder what the thinking was behind the people who’ve placed these flags here… context is everything after all.

We can argue as much as we want over the “true meaning” of the Confederate Battle Flag and though I DO think it’s improper to fly it over our buildings today (I mean, come on, it’s a rebellion and a vanquished nation that no longer exists… why should the country that crushed the Confederacy fly its flag?) I think it’s probably the right thing to drape over these kids’ graves. They died for their country, and though their country no longer exists outside of the dated dreams of white supremacists and southern fantasists, it WOULD be dishonourable to drape their graves with the flag of the nation they died fighting against… and though I think it’s probably legit to believe that the Confederate States were being formed with inhumane ideals (at least, assuming you consider people other than just white guys “human”), I don’t think those ideologies can be applied to the individual soldiers any more than you should accuse individual American soldiers that fought in Iraq of simply being there for the oil.

They fought and died for their country, which is more than I ever plan to do for mine, and even though I have contempt for the nation they were a part of, few Confederate soldiers chose that nation… most of our nationalities are accidents of birth and geography.

Complicated feelings indeed. Beautiful at sunset. I feel ashamed being seen entering the cemetery by a passing black man, because I’d hate to think HE thought I was there to pay my respects to symbols so owned by racial hatred…. But I also think that erasing them is not the answer. Ignoring these parts of our past, tearing them down, whitewashing the whitewashing… we need to know it’s there. We can’t hide from it. I won’t even use the argument that we have to know our history to avoid repeating it because there are those that will point to our darkest times as halcyon days… but without that context, we can’t see how we’ve changed, cannot see how far we’ve come. We cannot truly recognize the horror of war if we erase every grave, we cannot recognize that good, intelligent people can be swayed by horrific causes without understanding that it wasn’t just a couple of people that seceded, and those people didn’t just go away after they lost. And we certainly can’t appreciate the freedoms we have now if we don’t understand what freedoms we once did not have. We can’t appreciate that the fact that shitty little militias go about undermining America for the sake of white nationalism is actually PROGRESS – unless we remember that 150 years ago it wasn’t shitty little militias – but a fifth of the nation and a legitimate army undermining America for the sake of white nationalism.

And without that context it’s also hard to hold optimism … but we have to remember that in the Civil War a fifth of the nation and a legitimate army was put firmly in its place for the sake of a more equal and integrated United States. It’s not perfect. It’s not going to be perfect. It’s getting better. And without knowing how bad it was we can’t comprehend that – and without knowing it’s all still there – we can’t understand why we’re still fighting.