It was disappointing to see that a school district in Virginia decided to reinstate the names of three Confederate officers to two of its buildings.
This is a reversal of a decision made four years ago in reaction to the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the subsequent racial reckoning that followed. I don’t know what’s sadder, that we needed Floyd’s death to ignite that reckoning, or that it’s shelf life – at least in the case of this district – was less than half a decade.
With this reversal, the Shenandoah County School Board appears to be the first in the country to make such a switch, the New York Times reported. Back then the board voted to change the names of Ashby-Lee Elementary to Honey Run Elementary and Stonewall Jackson High to Mountain View High.
But as the Times reported: “A fury had been unleashed in the rural county in the mountains of Virginia. People crowded into school board meetings, denouncing the name changes as secretive and rushed through with little advance notice, and voicing deeper resentments about cultural shifts they saw as being foisted upon them.”
Remember that “cultural shifts” part. The county is more than 90 percent white – no surprise there – and it is the South after all. As one former school board member said, “They cannot let it go. It’s been four years. The Civil War only lasted four years.”
The first attempt at the change ended in a tie in 2022. Then in 2023, three idiots – sorry, I mean conservatives – were elected to the board spouting the Right’s tired old bellyaching about a so-called “woke Leftist agenda.”
The thing is, this isn’t the only example of actions trending back toward racism that we’ve seen in this country. As the Times reported, “new classroom curriculums about the nation’s racial history have been curtailed or eliminated” in reaction to “critical race theory,” and schools have reinstated mascots that have been condemned as racially offense.
This is a Republican-backed trend that has nothing to do with history or culture and everything to do with dividing and conquering a country that’s shown an alarming propensity to have too many people led around by the nose by a cynical operation.
You can read the Times’ story here.
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This may be time for a good old-fashioned intervention. Like you do for someone you care about whose life is barreling in the wrong direction. So, to our Southern Americans, I say this:
We won. You lost. Get over it.
Of course, there’s more to it than that. Still, nobody likes to get their ass kicked and then have countless history books written about how they got their ass kicked. This is about the historic reality of the Civil War.
Confederate military members – many of whom I’m sure showed true bravery on the battlefield -- displayed that bravery on behalf of a group of states that banded together to attack the U.S. government in an effort to perpetuate our greatest sin – slavery.
These men were more than happy to kill as many U.S. government soldiers as necessary for their cause. And let’s call it what it was. I know it’s called the North against the South, but in reality, it was the U.S. government against the South.
These people aren’t heroes. They’re traitors. It’s the same as if Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin got together today, formed an army, and attacked Washington, D.C.
Let’s stop sugar coating it and quit trying to put a positive spin on a violent, treasonous, attack in support of shipping African Americas from their home countries against their will, holding them as prisoners, and forcing them to work for affluent white men.
Even back then the rich pulled the strings.
Are you okay there South? I guess I’ve been kind of rough on you, but you might want to sit down as I’m not done yet.
What went on in that Virginia school district and in the other examples of “anti-woke” actions is just the Republican Party playing the rubes for suckers. You see, for the most part, they don’t give a rat’s ass about your heritage, or you for that matter.
This is just another example of the GOP pushing an issue it thinks will enrage and energize their base, and racism has always been one of its most effective standbys. From Nixon’s Southern Strategy, to Reagan’s “states’ rights” speech in Mississippi, to the shenanigans of four-time indicted/twice impeached/sexual assaulter/tax cheater/former president Donald Trump.
They do it because they know it works. They know that there’re too many people in this country who if you make it a black-white issue (or a gay-straight issue), even subliminally, they’ll hop on your bandwagon faster than you can say, “Hey, we’re conning you.”
Stonewall Jackson may be a hero to you. To them he’s just another prop in their desperate, pathetic, morally bankrupt effort to grab and retain power.
If they can keep enough of us in their bubble, looking in the mirror at a reflection they’re orchestrating, trying to scare/cajole you into joining their side -- instead of looking out the window at the rest of the country and seeing what’s really going on -- they have a chance to succeed.
And, in the end, their success will be our country’s failure.
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