History

There's a lot of American history in Virginia, some good, some bad. A lot of it very bad. They say that the winners write the history, but I don't think that holds true in the American south. Losers still dominate much of the political structure of the south. I value history as much as anyone, but many in the south have chosen to fetishize it rather than learn from it.


The Charlottesville area has had a debate recently, as have many other southern towns and cities, about confederate civil war monuments and statues that dominate the city parks and town squares. I am of two minds on this issue, but at the end of the day I believe that a community has the right to have its public spaces reflect the community as it exists today. Although each generation has an obligation to preserve the past, the past generation does not have the right to rule the future. That is the antithesis of progress, although that is a view and a preference espoused by many. Some communities are more progressive than others. Some will change and progress with time, some will remain mired in the past. That's a choice each community is entitled to make.


Today there was a KKK rally at one of the city parks in Charlottesville around a statue of Stonewall Jackson. These people were mostly from out of state but they set their sights on Charlottesville because it's a city that has decided to remove the statues of dead confederates from its parks and to rename the parks. There are legal issues that will work through the courts, but it unfortunately caught the attention of the Klan and neo-nazi groups. About 20 of these low lifes showed up in Charlottesville today, each of them the epitome of pure white trash. The event was indistinguishable from your typical Trump rally.

While I have had mixed feelings about the archaic civil war monuments and statues, I'm beginning to believe that if they are going to attract this sort of element to town, rather than merely moving them it might be better to melt them down and supply the metal to a modern sculptor for a commissioned work to represent what the community stands for today, not 100+ years ago.

Those are just some of my thoughts on today's events. The pictures are of Maya and TJ walking at Pleasant Grove, a historical property, now a park, in Fluvanna County, Virginia.

Deer have been spotted.

Two deer running across the road not far
in front of us.