Hey, isn't that General Robert E. Lee inside that furnace...?
Yes, that happened, and it's good.
Issue #400 OpEd Monday, October 30, 2023
So I’d have to say that the most interesting story I read all week was this one which appeared in the Washington Post on October 26. Confederate General Robert E. Lee has been melted down. Not the actual guy, who died 153 years ago on October 12, 1870, after doing his part to try and preserve slavery for the Southern states during the Civil War. Lee would have probably referred to that little altercation as The War of Northern Aggression but, well, his side lost. And since history isn’t usually written by those who lost, ole Bob doesn’t get to do the naming honors.
Except…
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The thing about the South losing the Civil War is that some folks, all these years later, still can’t quite wrap their heads around that fact. Not the alternative fact but the actual fact that yes, the South really did lose the war. I suspect these delusional dummies are in many ways related to that crowd of delusional dummies who stormed the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, refusing to believe that Trump, Their Almighty One, had also lost. You might recall that one of those dummies raised a Confederate flag inside the nation’s capital, the first time this had ever happened in our nation’s history.
The amusing thing about these delusional types is that they are delusional, and sometimes it’s fun to watch crazy people do crazy things. But the other thing about delusional types is that too often they take up residence inside their delusions. This means that anytime somebody comes knocking, trying to let them know they need to move to a neighborhood that actually exists, they get violent. They would rather kill the messenger than read the message.
Which might explain why, once the decision was made to melt down the statue of Robert E. Lee, it had to be done in secret. No information concerning the location of the actual meltdown could be made public - let alone the names or images of those who melted the man down - because then the delusional dummies would go on a murderous rampage seeking revenge and recompense for the desecration their symbol of all they claim is good and right with white nationalism.
From the Post:
So the statue of the Confederate general that once stood in Charlottesville — the one that prompted the deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017 — was now being cut into fragments and dropped into a furnace, dissolving into a sludge of glowing bronze.
Six years ago, groups with ties to the Confederacy had sued to stop the monument from being taken down. Torch-bearing white nationalists descended on the Virginia college town to protest its removal, and one man drove his car through a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 35 others.
The statue’s defenders more recently sought to block the city from handing Lee over to Charlottesville’s Black History Museum, which proposed a plan to repurpose the metal. In a lawsuit, those plaintiffs suggested the century-old monument should remain intact or be turned into Civil War-style cannons.
But on Saturday the museum went ahead with its plan in secret at this small Southern foundry outside Virginia, in a town and state The Washington Post agreed not to name because of participants’ fears of violence.
Finding a foundry to take on a project like this one was hardly an easy task. Plenty of people said no. But the owner of this foundry, a Black man, said he didn’t feel like he had a choice.
“The risk is being targeted by people of hate, having my business damaged, having threats to family and friends,” he said. Yet, “when you are approached with such an honor, especially to destroy hate, you have to do it.”
Hats off to the brother who agreed to let his foundry be used to torch Gen. Lee. I consider him yet another of those civil rights heroes that most of us will never know. His courage is a reminder that there are still those willing to keep on fighting - and that the fight is far from over.
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