“This is an injustice for me and my family. This is part of my family’s history...and their answer is to erase my great-grandmother’s history. A black female...it hurts.”
-Larnell Evans Sr. (Aunt Jemima’s Great Grandson)
“My father would have hated Black Lives Matter. It’s pitting black people against everyone else.”
-Muhammad Ali Jr (Muhammad Ali’s son)
To all millennial social media protestors frothing at the mouth at the behest of Apple and Pepsi’s social justice demands; will these quotes even make you stop, pause, and perhaps consider other ways of thinking? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Which tells me you have dropped reason, logic, and compassionate understanding for the new trend of Hot Topic politics. This isn't a nuanced life to you anymore. It’s sports. It’s high school lunch table warfare.
Now that I know that’s the case. Here’s an unpopular opinion, and much needed objective historical facts for you all. Beware Cancel Culture Crusaders you may trigger yourself to death over this piece.
Robert E. Lee was a good man.
I began writing this piece coincidentally on June, 19th, 2020. Juneteenth Day. An emancipation holiday. The Juneteenth a month after the death of George Floyd. Where this day has quickly become a corporate greeting card holiday to make millions off of a swarm of rich white millennial protestors. Dutiful followers for the cause. This holiday recognizes the Union army sending troops into Texas to take out some confederate holdouts, and free the slaves they still had under their control. I am in no way against the holiday. In fact I think it’s a very cool little Texas regional moment in our history. I embrace celebrating it. The Confederacy lost, and well I’m a Jersey boy and a Yankee through and through. I would have been all for sending down troops to tell them the proverbial “What’s up.”
Why then did I choose to continue to write about how Robert E. Lee was a good man on Juneteenth day? A day where we are to begin to celebrate as a nation for the first time the last little dust pan wipe up of the Confederacy. Mostly, because watching my entire generation fall in line is a shallowly cheap sight. I didn’t like try-hards growing up in school, and I most certainly don’t like them in this jungle we all call adulthood. And, well, because he was a good man. History is messy. Good men and women have gotten caught up in misguided loyalty to their home and neighbors throughout the course of time. Not just white men. Black individuals significant to our history have nuances of greatness and shame as well. The color of your skin doesn’t excuse your sins, and it shouldn’t wipe away your accomplishments either.
To all millennials' taking a knee to the mob, here’s the passage you would love for me to write.
Robert E. Lee was a racist. An ignorant nationalist to the Confederacy and his home state of Virginia over the righteous cause of the Union and Lincoln. A white supremacist surely. A man who led troops to murder Union soldiers for the cause of keeping slavery intact.
I won’t write that. I reject that hypothesis, and that’s all it should ever be; a hypothesis. Once you dig deep into who the man was in his heart and mind, none of that is even remotely true. In fact there are sound objective moral and ethical arguments for him over that of Lincoln and Grant’s moral compasses. Did he end up on the wrong side of history? Unfortunately, yes. But, not without pause, and serious regret. If you understand nuance, compassion, and the complexities of our human species, that should interest you. That should make you want to pick up well researched Robert E. Lee books in attempts to understand the man. That should make you want to exercise forgiveness towards his decision of leading the Confederacy, and learn about the complicated nature of not only our American history, but of us as humans. I will forever stand on the side of reflecting on history, good and bad. Not cancelling it. Just as I will never be a willing participant to the contemporary cancel culture led by privileged bored white kids, and their Instagram corporate overlords. Orwell and Bradbury warned us their entire literary careers about the dangerous pitfalls of erasing history, and censorship. No matter how virtuous the reasoning behind it may be. 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. Do yourself a favor, and pick these books up. Educate yourself. Not just lazily quote them on your twitter pages.
Here’s my honest passage in staunch rejection to the misguided contemporary hypothesis about Lee:
Robert E. Lee was a good man, on the wrong side of history. Cared about the men and women he grew up next to, perhaps more so than the nation’s health. An intellectual patriotic warrior who loved America. He was Lincoln’s first choice to lead the Union army, but Lee couldn’t get past the idea of leading men to murder his family, and friends. He respectfully rejected Lincoln’s multiple pleas. An honorable gut wrenching decision, that inevitably led him to lead the army fighting for an immoral treasonous cause. He regretted the war and his decision all the way to the day he died. He cared for the lives of his soldiers. A genius of a general. Saddled by a downfall in personal strategy that was curtailed by his moral obligation to the lives and families of his soldiers. (Conversely Grant and Sherman used their men, and battalions as human fodder just to win the war). Lee was a good man, caught up in a much needed transitional time in history. His heart and mind in the right place. His decisions were morally and ethically misguided, and yet at the same time they were not at all. A human hypocrisy that we have all fell into at one time or another in our lives. I have read about this man at length. I choose to exercise forgiveness and compassion for his sins, and remember him as a significant individual that we should honor in our history.
I will conclude this plea for history over mob rule censorship, with deep and thoughtful quotes from the man himself. My hope? For you to pause, and choose to understand all angles of human history. Not just your own.
“What a cruel thing war is, to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors.”
“I cannot trust a man to control others, who cannot control himself.”
“The war... was an unnecessary condition of affairs, and might have been avoided if forbearance and wisdom had been practiced on both sides.”
“If a friend asks a favor, you should grant it if it is reasonable; if not, tell him plainly why you cannot: You will wrong him and wrong yourself by equivocation of any kind.”
“Never do a wrong thing to make a friend or keep one; the man who requires you to do so is dearly purchased at a sacrifice.”
“We should live, act, and say nothing to the injury of anyone. It is not only best as a matter of principle, but is the path to peace and honor.”
“In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as institution is a moral and political evil in any country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages.”
“I have been up to see the Congress and they do not seem to be able to do anything except to eat peanuts and chew tobacco, while my army is starving.”
“A Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets has no charm for me. If the Union is dissolved and government disrupted, I shall return to my native state and share the miseries of my people, and save in defense will draw my sword on none.”
“While we see the course of the final abolition of human slavery is onward, & we give it the aid of our prayers & all justifiable means in our power, we must leave the progress as well as the result in his hands who sees the end; who chooses to work by slow influences; & with whom two thousand years are but as a single day.”
So, the next time you turn on the nightly news and are inundated by the corporately sponsored swarm of righteous sadists screeching “TEAR IT DOWN!” Think about these carefully well thought out compassionate quotes. Straight from the man we must not think of as anything else but our newly reignited collective enemy from the past. Or else... you will walk the ignorant racist plank of death for equality, brought to you by iPhone 10.
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