Off the Cuff

A few months ago I ran into an old friend, Sandra, at an art show, and we started talking about our mutual Facebook friends and their political views.  I told her that I was planning to write a post on my blog entitled "Unvarnished, " giving my opinion on the election and the motivations of those that voted for Trump.  I have that post in the works, but, as I pointed out to my friend Mark a while back, now that I'm on Facebook my blog hasn't been the place I go to make my daily observations.  Instead, my posts are more like research projects, and it takes a lot of time to put one together.  So far, "Unvarnished" is just a list of links to articles that help explain what I want to say, but not a word of my own has actually been written.
  Today, I want to do something different. This post has no links, and no background research.  It's just what I think.  With the events in Charlottesville this past weekend, I just need to say some things.  So, this is, essentially, my visceral reaction to today's news as it is presented on my Facebook page.

One thing that keeps coming up in various forms is the ridiculous Rewriting History argument, the idea that by tearing down statues of Robert E Lee, etc., is trying to hide the past and pretend it didn't happen.  That's patently false.  In Germany (and, yes, Germany is the ONLY reasonable comparison.  As a former Atlanta mayor said, the Confederate flag is the American swastika,) they did not erect statues to Adolf Hitler and company sixty years after the fall of the Third Reich.  They do not fly the flag of the Third Reich along with the current flag of Germany to "honor the past."  In fact, tourists in Germany have been arrested this past week for performing the Nazi salute in public places.  That's how strongly they feel about the past.  What IS done is that there are several monuments to the victims of the Nazis, including the preservation of some of the places where they were tortured and killed.  There are no monuments to honor the perpetrators of horrible crimes against humanity.

A friend of a friend made a joke, saying "WWRELD (What Would Robert E Lee do?)"  If there is any truth to the article I read this week, what he did was say that it wasn't a good idea to keep remembrances of civil strife, but to do like other nations have done and put them in the past.  According to the article, he was not buried in his Confederate uniform, as his family felt that that would be treason.

One friend seems to believe that there's some kind of double standard when it comes to linking politicians to their violent supporters, and to whether said politician/party/ideology is responsible for the violence, and whether they are pressured to denounce said violence.
  I don't know how to relate this to real life.
  To begin with, left wing violence, as far as I can tell, is an aberration.  On the other hand, right wing extremism is a major concern for law enforcement across the country.  While Islamophobes worry about whether some random refugee is going to be the next unibomber, this week a right wing extremist tried to blow up a building in downtown OKC, half a block from where I work --WHILE I WAS AT WORK! 
  Furthermore, Bernie Sanders did not encourage violence the way Trump has, which means that his allies did not have to defend, re-interpret, or ignore anything he might have said.  Nor did he have to be pressured to condemn the violence committed by his supporter; he did so immediately, and without reservations.  Trump, on the other hand, first gave a statement in which he chose his words carefully, so as not to offend the white supremacists or the neo-Nazis who believed that they were in Charlottesville to accomplish his agenda, and when he did finally bow to pressure to condemn the violence and the ideologies behind it, he did so like a hostage being forced to read a statement.
 
   I'll probably get some reaction to the last two paragraphs from people who've been convinced that Black Lives Matter is a leftist terrorist organization for whom violence is the go to tactic.  I was privy to a conversation between a hotel guest from Australia and one of our weekend policemen.  The guest asked something (I wish I could remember what, exactly) about policing the black community, and the policeman's response was, "They're the ones committing all the crimes."  I wish that I had been bold enough to interject that "they" were just the ones getting caught (and killed in inexcusable numbers,) and that there is a long and complicated history concerning institutionalized racism, white privilege, segregation, poverty, deprivation, and crime.  I did make a mental note that this guy, this one policeman guy, is why Black Lives Matters exists.  And I work with him periodically.

And finally...