Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
QOTD: Fathers and Sins
“Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; each will die for their own sin.” Deuteronomy 24:16 (NIV)
“For whatever measure you deal out to others will be dealt to you in return.” Luke 6:38 (NEB)
In evangelical circles, it’s common to hear someone say they have been “given” a scripture citation that resonates with a situation or personal challenge. It’s supposed to be the Holy Spirit tapping you on the shoulder with a gentle “Excuse me, but remember that verse in John’s gospel you learned in VBS in 1974? Take another look at it. You may find it of particular interest today.”
So, maybe it isn’t strange that these two verses bobbed up, separately, in my reading on the very day I learned that my high school was set to undergo a ritual cleansing to expiate the sins of its founders.
Yes, friends, I am a graduate of Robert E. Lee High School in Montgomery, Alabama. That’s the official name. We just called it “Lee.”
The school board has decided to rename the three largest high schools. Along with Lee, there is Sidney Lanier High School and Jefferson Davis High School.
Well, you can see the problem. Those gol-darned Confederates.
Lanier was founded around 1910, and named for an obscure Georgia poet you can be forgiven for not knowing. I have no idea why. I guess he may have passed through the city. Unfortunately for posterity, he served, again obscurely, in the CSA army.
The football team was the Poets. Really. That nickname didn’t get a payoff until its cross-town rival, Lee, was built in the mid-1950s. We were the Generals, and this gridiron feud was serious business through the ‘60s. Every season was capped with the Lee-Lanier game, which invariably featured a banner with the strange device, “The poet’s pen is mightier than the general’s sword.”
In 1970, Jeff Davis H.S. was built. Now, by that time there really was no excuse for choosing that name. But, while Davis was a Mississippian, at least he did live in Montgomery, the Confederacy’s first capital, briefly.
Now all three schools are set to get new names (to be determined later). It’s an appropriate move (although I might spare poor Sidney). Montgomery’s public schools have undergone re-segregation and are overwhelmingly black. Those Civil War “heroes” don’t look so heroic to the current students, or, indeed, most of the country.
If by renaming a few schools we can put to rest the bloody divisions caused by the sins of our great-grandfathers, then it’s well worth it. There’s a faint hope that our removing them from pedestals, literal and figurative, can put the blame where it belongs. Maybe we, their chagrined descendants, won’t have to bear the punishment for them.
But I fear our times are not noted for letting “each die for their own sin.” Collective and hereditary guilt seems to be the order of the day.
Jesus’ words as quoted by St. Luke should serve as a warning to zealots of every stripe. If they have ears to hear.
Published in Group Writing
It won’t work. There’s no satisfying the left without more demands to follow. The names should stay. For those who don’t like the names, think of the irony about how these Southern figures would feel now, knowing a large number of black children attend schools that bear their names.
My guess is they wouldn’t care . . .
Progressives are into collectivism and collective guilt. Most believe that white people living today are guilty for slavery and Jim Crow. Well, okay. Let’s play that game. One of the reasons that the early Progressives changed their name to “liberal” (which, at the time meant belief in individualism free markets, as it still does in Europe) was that “Progressive” had been sullied by its connection to Eugenics. So. I’ll agree to not blame today’s Progressives for the crimes committed in the name of Eugenics if they’ll agree not to blame me for slavery and Jim Crow. Deal?
The radicals will not stop. Ordinary people will have to say “no mas.”
And my parents were graduates of Robert E. Lee High School outside of Houston. I agree with the above commenters. There will be no satisfying the Left. If you give them an inch, they’ll drive a truck through it every time. They start with the low-hanging fruit, the targets that are harder to defend.
This is how they achieved the de-platforming of Conservatives from social media including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. They started with Alex Jones. And they clapped their hands in glee when so many of us stood on the sidelines or distanced ourselves saying, “Oh him? I don’t listen to him” or “I don’t agree with him anyway.” Alex Jones and Robert E. Lee and the rest of them are not the point. There is a larger principle here. Just as there’s a larger principle behind the mandatory masks. I’m horrified that more of us don’t seem to see it.
What’s the larger point as you see it? For me, it’s that people should be reasonable and make reasonable compromises to preserve the union. It’s reasonable to stop honoring Confederate leaders. They were in rebellion against our country. It’s unreasonable to dishonor the Founding Fathers. They made our country.
The larger principle is allowing them to erase our history. They start with the easy targets: He was a slave owner! He said a racist thing in 1863! etc etc. It’s harder to defend, and even you are saying it’s reasonable to stop honoring them. We cave to that, and they see a victory. And now they’re pointing out that all the founding fathers owned slaves, and next they’re coming for Mount Rushmore. It has to stop. They want to erase our history and start us at their “Year 0.”
You canNOT compromise with these people.
They most assuredly do not. They will hear nothing but our surrender.
This is the Quote of the Day. We still have six open dates at the end of this month. If you have a quotation that is bouncing around your head, why not let it out to play in other people’s heads here on Ricochet? Come sign up.
No, no, the opposite of that. The Northerners had rebelled against the founding. The Southerners still clung to these United States, while the Northerners wanted it as the United States. It wasn’t one nation, it was a federation of independent states.
History is written by the victors. And we’d all do well to remember that in our present era.
But the Union, the one country, was the result of the Constitution. It was the very meaning of it, as Federalist Papers shows.
And the truths in the Declaration were not consistent with slavery.
Antebellum America was not the nation we have now, it’s true, but it wasn’t a mere federation. That’s what we had before the Constitution was ratified. The question the rebels asked, and the Union Army answered, was whether, like sacramental marriage, that ratification was for good and all, no going back.
I have heard the cry of “It wasn’t about slavery!” all my life. It was. Yes, there were other issues that alienated the South from the North, but I very much doubt the two sides would have come to blows if it weren’t for the Big Issue. Slavery is the sine qua non of the Civil War.
I, for one, am glad the union prevailed. I’m a Southerner born and bred, but more than that, I’m an American. (Cue the patriotic music.)
(None of which means we can’t say the States have rights and ought to have a lot more power than they do, and the feds a lot less.)
So much for appreciating the white people who got rid of slavery and Jim Crow . . .
I adhere to the phrase, “American by birth – Southern by the Grace of God.”
The states used to have a lot more power than the Feds. The War of Northern Aggression changed all that . . .
States need to reassert their authority under the 10th Amendment, but many aren’t willing to do so for many reasons, the biggest being loss of Federal funds. Reagan withheld Federal highway funds to force states to raise the drinking age to 21 – something I’ve never forgiven him for:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_Act
Both the left and the right want to withhold Federal dollars from states to enforce their edicts, albeit for different reasons.
Another reason states don’t reassert their 10th Amendment authority is because the left and the right will never agree. The left become fierce advocates of the 10th Amendment when states’ rights support a leftist cause. Legalizing drug use is one, declaring sanctuary for illegal aliens is another. The right believes in states’ rights when it comes to abortion (at least they used to) and “gay” marriage, among other things.
It’s a mess . . .
Hopefully that works out as well as it did for Napoleon.
This is is an ongoing movement, which I wrote about in November regarding the change to the name of Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, VA (the home of Robert E. Lee). I actually like the new name – Washington-Liberty HS – just fine, but there is surely something going on in our country today that is not about liberty. I think liberty is better served by encouraging citizens, residents and students to be informed of history.
Suspira,
I understand the idea. However, I’d like just one more bit of zealotry. The Sulzbergers, owners of the New York Times, are now recognized as having owned slaves and being Confederate sympathizers. I would like BLM/Antifa to occupy the New York Times building and then burn it to the ground. Preferably with a Sulzberger or two locked in a closet.
Regards,
Jim
No. No again. It seems there were at least some prominent Northerners who also displayed, at different times during the years prior to the Civil War, a “these United States” outlook—-the outlook that states had a right to secede from the Union. There was in the North also some “right to secede“ talk brought on by abolitionist disapproval of slavery. And, according to one article I found, (1) editorials in Northern newspapers indicate many people who didn’t want southern states to secede were still under the impression, or misimpression, that those states had a right to secede.
The outlook, or misunderstanding, that states had a right to secede from the Union was pretty common in people—-North and South—-at the time.
(1) Yankee Confederates: New England Secession Movements Prior to the War Between the States, by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
10 Facts About Secession From U.S., by Kevin Robillard, published 11/14/2012 in Politico
I attended 4 different (white) high schools in Atlanta when there were 13 total white high schools. There is only one high school, of those 13, with the same name as when I was attending. That was when white students and black students went to separate schools because they were segregated by law. All these changes have taken place over sixty years and has been hardly noticed. But progress made without notice and upheaval doesn’t count for much, I guess.
Guess we gonna have to rename the Columbia River?
Roll on Columbia, Roll on.
I don’t disagree with any of this.
Re : #25
Lee seems to have been a decent and gifted human being who had to make a tragic choice. There’s something dangerous about this determination to avoid honoring him.
We’re discouraging kids on the verge of adulthood from looking honestly first at themselves and then out at the world that’s gone from the vantage point of the person in history. I think people who don’t develop that empathy are even more likely to blame the son or daughter for his or her parent’s sins.
Several Leftist governors agree with you.
The fallacy in the ‘woke’ thinking is that this punishment and retribution is warranted because of failure to act perfectly back in the day. Reason tells us this is how we learn and improve without guarantees that the steps taken to improve will be executed perfectly either. There is no disagreement among most Americans, and little disagreement at all, that the institution of slavery is wrong and measures taken to alleviate still persisting ill effects that institution has caused to Americans can be valid. We are still in the business of failures and mistakes.
I’m thinking Lee just happened to be in the position he was in at a very pivotal time in our country’s history. Remembering him, and honoring the way he told his soldiers to accept the surrender, helps us to remember that we were once “these United States”, how that was different from today, how the change came about and at what cost.
Remembering and honoring Lee can also help us remember the ways in which the evil of slavery, and people’s involvement in life and business in their states—-with black people, in some cases, being slaveholders and supporting the Confederacy; with Northerners surviving or thriving by cotton fed mills; with blacks, who were free, facing danger, oppression and bigotry in the North and South; with child labor in the North, and with factory workers in the North frequently working under conditions that left them with less money and time to improve their lives than some slaves had; with the South’s fear of the North’s possible involvement in future slave uprisings——was complicated and interconnected.
But only until a Democrat is President. And in the meantime are they trying lawful means to get back state power?
Good point. Once the confedrate statues are gone, that takes care of the War Between the States. But the slavery problem still remains, and the solution is . . . (drum roll) . . . to remove statues of Washington, Jefferson, etc.