Monumental Events 0

Before every courthouse in every city and county in the South stands a Confederate monument. It commonly takes the form of a statue of a soldier atop a pillar and bears some sort of inscription in memory of those who fought for the Secesh.

Unlike the Confederate battle ensign, Confederate monuments have not become symbols of contemporary hate; for most, I suspect, they fade into the background, though I must admit that this is my own not-black perspective. I have not yet seen a bumper sticker of a Confederate monument on a pick-up truck between the NRA sticker and the Gadsden flag license plate.

Nevertheless, the Charleston shootings and the recent decisions on the part of some stores and governors to remove the Stars and Bars from sale and display have rippled out to include them. In Jefferson Davis’s capital, someone had the gall, the unmitigated gall, to “deface” (in the words of the news story) one with the slogan, “Black Lives Matter.”

Closer to home, the resident curmudgeon of my local rag (working motto: “Other people can’t have nice things”), pretzels her logic to defend a local one as a benign symbol of another time.