The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Bob Butler 54]

(07-01-2020, 10:07 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Did anyone say that America was ever perfect? It is safe to figure -- and mainstream black leaders of the time so recognized -- that defeating people who would have probably gassed blacks in America upon their victory was more important at the time than undoing Jim Crow practice.  Were the Nazis to win World War II, then any struggle to end the separate-but-equal sham would be irrelevant because there might be no blacks in America. A few whiffs of fumes of hydrogen cyanide make every little frustration and every wondrous hope completely irrelevant. 

The defeat of Nazi racism made American racism less supportable. Racism is no less tolerable because it has the word "American" attached.

Considering how vile the regimes in Germany and Italy that America defeated, it is safe to say that American conquest is genuine liberation. America is not perfect and has never been. The Generational Cycle ensures that America will not get into a rut and then rot from there.

If you consider the typical culture of the Agricultural Age, there were many flaws.  Each crisis removed a few.  The majors are kings, slaveowners, laissez faire businessmen, and dictators.  If you include the last awakening as transformational, you have racism again, sexism, a simplistic version of the domino theory and the environment.

The major flaws confronting the culture at the time are addressed.  All flaws are not addressed.  In a sense I can sympathize with Classic.  It becomes hard to celebrate defeat over any flaw without celebrating the flaws that remained.  Many patriots who got rid of kings owned slaves.  The economic victors of the Civil War were the robber barons.

But sometimes the conservative faction that looses a transformation lives on.  The one time slaveowners get into Jim Crow, then into the violent racist police killings.  Memorializing and celebrating the conservative losing faction that lives on seems different from celebrating the defeat of one issue but being wrong on an issues whose time has not come yet.

We seem to be getting better at it.  One of the more celebrated pictures than statue that came out of World War II is of the flag raising at Iwo Jima.  One of the more celebrated statues of the Civil Rights movement is that of Martin Luther King.  Do we tear down the flag raising statue because everyone involved was white, and the minorities were segregated into non-combat units?  Can we think of a modern issue that Martin Luther King didn’t address yet?  Do we deny folk sainthood because an issue’s time has not yet come?  Likely not.  We might put a footnote in the history books, but we should be careful about judging a man by the standards of his time, not by the values that were changed four or eight years after.

But it has taken several transformations to reduce racism and tribal thinking.  I am not inclined to honor those who resisted the values of equality and justice.  Sure, rename the forts that are named after Confederate officers.  Tear down the Confederate monuments.  If racism is persistent to perpetual, let’s not memorialize and perpetuate it.