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President Donald Trump on Thursday denounced the removal of monuments to Confederate figures as “sad” and “so foolish:
“Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You can’t change history, but you can learn from it.”
Uhm.
“Beautiful statues and monuments.”
He is referring to memorials to Confederate leaders as if they were lawn decorations which, if taken away, would make my perfectly coiffed yard seem a little ‘less than’ compared to my neighbor’s yard.
Please don’t take way my hand made gnomes!
This is horrible.
Simply horrible.
The lack of any intellectual awareness from Donald J Trump continues to be stunning no matter how often we are exposed to it.
Despite what our 140 character intellectual-in-chief may suggest not all the 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy in public spaces <source: SPLC> are created equal — 718 are monuments.
Look.
No sane person blames Trump for a divided country … although one could argue he is clearly exacerbating division on what used to be clearly what was right and what is wrong … and dark skinned people versus white people.
Okay. He is exacerbating divisive thinking.
However.
What he is being blamed for is not offering moral leadership in the discussion.
If anything he is stripping the conversation of any morality to suggest a naked choice. If only it were that simple. His vagueness begs people to fill in the hollowness with whatever nonsense they want to believe. And then, to make it worse, he offers his own intellectually vapid nonsense.
This is not a vapid simple issue but I will still offer how Bruce would resolve this:
- This statue thing is not a democrat versus republican issue it is a country issue. We should celebrate soldiers who died fighting bravely for what they believed was right.
We should never celebrate the leaders who made bad decisions, no matter how much we want to justify their difficult personal choices, which created the deaths of individual brave soldiers. If I go to Europe and world war 1 battlefields I see memorials to dead soldiers on both sides … but I don’t see statues of German generals.
- oddly … in a world in which we throw around absurd words like ‘snowflakes’ and ‘politically correct’ and ‘erasing history’ far too often … we seem to forget there are winners and there are losers.
We should celebrate winners, particularly the ones who stood for something right, rather than celebrate losers <who stood for something wrong>. I want statues of Abraham Lincoln … not Jefferson Davis. I want statues of Grant not Lee.
- Statues dedicated to solders bravery stay up … no matter which side they were on.
Statues that celebrate leaders of the ‘wrong side’ should be in museums as ‘lessons in history.’ I could argue any confederate statue erected in the 1910’s & 1920’s should simply be destroyed because their intent was to celebrate segregation <and this would eliminate something like 50% of monuments>.
“Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.”
Trump is an idiot.
Okay.
He is stupid.
Yes. I just said stupid.
I say stupid in this case because not only is he intellectually hollow & amoral he also cannot seem to swim out of the shallow end of the thinking pool to see how he could appeal to the people who deemed him worthy of voting for him … and elevating them and their thinking.
He continues to miss opportunities to make a point with regard to what he suggested he stood for <the forgotten everyday schmuck>. In this situation if he stood up and was able to put any semblance of a thought together in his word salad way he would say “the everyday soldier who served bravely should never be dishonored by the flaws of their leaders. Families sent their sons and many paid the ultimate price bravely. Memorials should stand to honor their families, them and their choice to serve. Statues of their leaders, who led them for a cause which was not for what makes America great, deserve to only remain in museums so that we can learn the lessons of their mistakes.”
While this is an incredibly complex issue, taking statues down isn’t about rewriting country history … it is about rewriting family choices and family history. If I pull them down indiscriminately I dishonor families who lost sons and take away a part of their personal history.
We need to separate the individual sacrifices made, honor them, and dishonor the larger cause and leaders who propagated it.
Sigh.
We will inevitably see hundreds of intellectual, and semi-intellectual, articles written about culture, the civil war and how a country faces its demons. People will spin this so many different ways trying to justify Trump words or demonize Trump lack of thinking you will get dizzy.
Stop spinning and take a deep breath and think with a little clarity.
I have stated ad nausea, this should be a debate of ideas and thinking because, in the end, the solution shouldn’t be some simplistic ‘take them down’ or ‘leave them up’ but rather an overall understanding and semi-alignment on the purpose of wherever we land decision-wise as a country.
And maybe that is my larger point today … Trump is not leading the discussion … he is offering the simplistic tripe of some guy on his 6th beer at the corner of the bar.
Donald J Trump is not just a horrible president … he is a horrible man … a horrible leader … and I even, at times, think he is a horrible American.
Complex issues demand leaders to not offer simplistic tripe which appeals to one sliver of America.
Complex issues demand leaders to be their best and appeal to the better aspects of people … and America in this case.
In business … complex issues demand business leaders to develop solutions which unite an organization and show a way forward.
And let me use business leadership to head off my good friends who will send me notes about my ‘white guilt’ and ‘bleeding heart liberal inclinations.’
I am president of a 400 person company. I just told about 75 of my employees, me <an old white guy> told them, that they should lighten up and look at those statues as beautiful statements of our history blessing the appearance of our public parks.
“… start a conversation within their beautiful shadows.”
Uhm.
Seems to me about 75 of my employees may look at me and say “fuck you old white man” which doesn’t necessarily breed organizational unity.
Look.
I am an everyday schmuck. I think the last Confederate statue I can actually remember paying attention to was in New Orleans <which means I have most likely walked by a dozen others and never even noticed>. But that’s not the point … I am not a leader nor am I the leader of a 330 million person country.
Complex issues reside in the deep end of the intellectual pool and good leaders learn to swim well enough to venture to that end of the pool. Trump can only stand in the shallow end.