Gone With The Wind

I wonder how long it will be before Gone With the Wind will be gone with the wind? I have seen more Confederate Flags this week than I have since mullets were in style and they adorned bikinis across southern beaches. Now we are talking about digging up historical figures because they may or may not have been racist. Not in South Carolina but here in Tennessee. Just in case our Legislatures have, indeed, lost their minds and perspectives, let’s remember that Tennessee was a split state at the time of the Civil War and that General Nathan Bedford Forrest was a representative of the portion of this state that followed the ideals of the Confederacy.

Did ugly things happen in the war? Well, yes. It was war. Ugly things happened on both sides. When Sherman marched through Fayetteville , as was noted in the Fayetteville Observer, he blamed both slaves and cotton for the war and wished them both in hell. Do we want to see his statues destroyed and his grave disturbed? His views do not negate his position in history and neither do Forrest’s. In fact, by his own accounting, Forrest had very different views regarding race later in his life, speaking on behalf of reconciliation to a group of color years after the war.

If we start digging up every historical figure that has walked outside political correctness ( which did not even exist in the time of Forrest and Sherman) we are going to have a whole bunch of holes in the ground. I find it interesting that in trying to right the perceived wrongs of 150 years ago, a time that no one living today can really appreciate, we are the closest to a civil war that we have been in more than a century. Those men fought that battle. The people of that time lived through the horror of a Country divided and turned on itself. Considering where we were and where we are today, I wonder just what those that lived through the first Civil War would say about our current discord? Would they find our fights as just as theirs or would they find us silly and nearsighted and more than a little spoiled?

Prejudice is wrong no matter how you cut it but we live in a nation that moved so far beyond the cotton fields that we have a two term President of color. We have white women pretending to be black and more than one of our presidential candidates are not white. This nation is now, for the first time in history, brown. Not white, not black. Brown. And yet there are some that would escalate the debate and create a real civil war, again.

Some are on a witch hunt and they are willing to tie everyone from Paula Dean to our police forces to the stake. When you can’t even dress up like Lucy and Ricky without someone crying racist then things have just gone over the top. I would bet that Desi Arnez would be flattered at the impersonation. The sad thing is that the mass over reaction takes away from real issues. Now we are all walking around, waving our flags and wagging our fingers and no one is listening. And that is the real shame.