It all started last week after a large group of protesters ripped down the statue of Robert E. Lee next to the public library. In the days that followed, I noticed radical changes in my behavior unlike anything I’d ever seen.
Before, I was your average suburbanite. I enjoyed simple things like watching classic movies and I had a solid job as a financial analyst. I had no prejudices and no grandiose political aspirations. Life was good.
But now that the Confederate statue in town has been destroyed, I’ve suddenly become drawn to my ancestral lands and the white American dream.
It’s freaking me out!
Stuff like this never used to happen when the statue was intact. I would look up at that monument and be absolutely certain that Confederate tradition was heinous and nothing to be glorified.
But now that it’s gone and that part of history has been erased, I’m deeply confused and don’t know what to believe.
I’ve started growing a scraggly beard and saying things like, “I do declare.”
I watched all of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and wasn’t really that bummed out.
And I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve listened to the song “Dixie’s Land” over two hundred times in twenty-four hours. I don’t even mean to put it on half the time. It’s like I’m possessed.
Turns out, everyone who has been defending Confederate monuments with the old “those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it” argument were right. I wish there was another way to remember history, I really do, but I’m afraid statues are our only option.
I wouldn’t suggest this if it wasn’t absolutely necessary, but we need to put the statues back.
I fear if we don’t, I, along with thousands of other white men across the country, will devolve into plantation-owning, mint julep-sipping Confederates who will take up arms against the Union.
I really, really don’t want that to happen. Can’t stress that enough. But with no statues or monuments to serve as historical and moral guides, it’s only a matter of time before I acquire a musket and fire the inaugural shots of the second Civil War.
So can we put the statues back? Please?
I just want to go back to being a regular guy who’s not hellbent on becoming the next hero of the Confederacy.
