At the start of this year, a crane appeared in Arlington National Cemetery and headed straight for the section of the sprawling graveyard reserved for soldiers of the old Confederacy. Without fanfare or much media attention, the crane removed a monument sculpted by world renowned Moses Jacob Ezekiel - a monument etched in memory of fallen confederates, replete with imagery of peace, reunification, restoration, and healing.
Someone at the Department of Defense, likely on orders of someone in the Biden White House, apparently thought the country would be better served by removing that part of our history. That seems to be a common theme these days.
We think that removing stone monuments erases uncomfortable, complex, or even dark portions of our history.
But you can't remove history. You can ignore it, but you can't delete it.
No matter how much revisionists wish it wasn't the case, our past will always be our past. It can be tainted, twisted, manipulated, or mis-told. But who we once were and where we've been will never be matters of opinion.
As a history teacher, here's what concerns me: I fear that in these emotion-driven attempts to correct the uncorrectable, or erase the un-erasable, we will lose sight of the complex nature of our nation's imperfectly remarkable story. Nothing is gained from that, and in fact, so much is lost.
Particularly right now, in this moment of cultural and societal dysfunction.
Consider this study recently released by NBC News:
It's tragic, but it's anything but surprising. This was the only possible result of training up a generation deprived of logic, history, and civics.
Commenting on those NBC numbers, Christian scholar Andrew T. Walker observed that our nation is "on the cusp of having what will be the most anxious, godless, childless, and rootless generation running the future." Each of those descriptors represents a different, but equally menacing threat to the future of our republic.
- Anxious - a psychological and emotional threat
- Godless - a spiritual threat
- Childless - an economic threat
- Rootless - a civilizational threat
It's the perfect storm - a disastrous combination of dangers that manifest in a confused and disoriented generation thinking they can make themselves great by excavating the very ground upon which they stand.
Which brings us back to Arlington this Memorial Day. Is there a principled and logical case to made against having monuments to the old Confederacy? Yes. In fact, Congress debated that very thing up through the turn of the 20th century when in 1903 they decided there was value in remembering our difficult past. But that is not where we are today. We aren't having reasoned discussions and coherent debate over these things. We march to the demands of the malcontents, react to the shriek of the mindless agitator.
We have become a people who lack reverence and appreciation for where we have been and what we have come through; a people who are incapable of seeing our ancestors as flawed contributors to the same pursuit of a more perfect union that we still seek; a people who would rather exacerbate or exploit the errors and shortcomings of the past rather than learn from them. As a result, we are surely a people, a civilization that is living on borrowed time.
Author Declan Leary commented on that covert statue removal at Arlington Cemetery:
For the first time in more than a century, Memorial Day will be observed with a gaping hole in one section of Arlington — in one section, that is, of our national memory.
That hole, of course, is far wider and deeper than the simple question of North and South. It is no mere reevaluation of the history of race that inspires such erasures; action on those grounds would have been taken years ago. The sudden iconoclasm can only be explained by a loss of the sense of patriotism, of purpose, that once gave meaning to that history. And how could it be otherwise? We are far removed not just from the ethos that once united even two sides in a war, but from all the trials and circumstances that formed it.
He couldn't be more correct. It's been a long time since our country collectively sacrificed for a common good. Which means absent that kind of generational struggle, the kind that shakes our population free from its captive apathy, we desperately need days like this.
We need Memorial Day.
We need to remember heroes, heroic causes, and heroic sacrifices again. We need to learn not just from the grave errors of our past - like those committed in the antebellum South - but also from the miraculous reconciliation that occurred afterwards. America isn't unique in that we fought a civil war or committed egregious sins. We are unique in that we reconciled after that war and paid the price of those sins on fields drenched in fraternal blood.
That is something worth remembering and honoring this Memorial Day, not erasing.
