Kristin Szakos is a city council member in Charlottesville, Virginia who is from elsewhere, and is married to a community organizer. She's a flaming "progressive" who believes in "feel-good" causes (because she "thinks" with her emotions), but don't imagine for a minute that her lack of cogitation makes her harmless.
Szakos is on a mad crusade to remove the monument to Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, and rename Lee Park, where it currently stands. A recent post she made to Facebook gives some instructive insight into the destructive leftist mentality, and what motivates it.
She actually says Lee would agree with removing the statue of himself. She bases this on a few lines from an anti-Lee book published in 2015, right smack-dab in the middle of the Politically Correct Revisionism Era. She didn't even have to hold a seance to find out what Lee thought. A writer born in 1983 is her "medium" for her spiritual communication with the great general who died 147 years ago. .
Szakos's Facebook post uses the same language we've become so familiar since the left escalated its war on Confederate heritage following the Charleston tragedy. It's the same language a host of other leftist groups and individuals use in the same war. If progressives weren't such mental clones, weren't so tightly bound to each other and equally dedicated to the destruction of what they hate, somebody could sue for plagiarism...
That somebody could conceivably be the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has orchestrated a nationwide war on Confederate artifacts, particularly monuments, post-Roof. But, of course, Dees and Co. are happy to share their ammunition, and have others share it, as well, so there will be no plagiarism complaints from that quarter. In any case, I think we can safely assume that's where Szakos got her talking points.
You don't have to read Szakos for long to realize that what she really motivated by, and what she's trying to foment in others, is enmity for white Southerners. That's what motivates the SPLC, too, . Yes, the left attempts to inflame hatred of all whites -- in the USA, Europe, Australia and other European derived cultures. But here in the US of A, Southerners are given a special place, a unique status, in the leftist mentality.
Because, you know, slavery and racism.
Says Szakos, "It is no accident that this statue and others like it were erected long after Mr. Lee's death -- almost 60 years after the War -- at a time when Reconstruction backlash was being expressed in lynchings across the South and in laws like the Racial Purity Act, passed in Virginia that same year. It is not surprising that the Ku Klux Klan celebrated its dedication with a cross burning on Browns Mountain and a march through the city."
It's obvious to most normal people that just because two or more things happen at roughly the same time, that doesn't mean they are related. It would likely never occur to Szakos that monuments to Confederate heroes were erected when the people of the impoverished South finally had the funds to do so. Moreover, there is usually a delay before memorials to soldiers, leaders and other civic and national heroes are erected. The Vietnam War ended April 30, 1975 but the Vietnam Memorial was not completed until 1982. The Lincoln Memorial was not erected and opened until 1922, and the Jefferson Memorial dates to 1943, 120 years after the great man's death.
But to social justice warriors, racism is the only thing that concerns contemporary Southerners, just a slavery was the only thing that concerned antebellum Southerners. Family? Nah. Community? Nope. Church? No way. Only slavery and racism ... or rather (since the term "racism" has been so ridiculously over used and misused) white supremacy. And for progressives, that bizarre and untrue caricature is all the justification they need for hating Southerners, and fomenting the same antipathy for them among as many others as possible.
To Szakos, the only possible reason the people of Charlottesville could have had for erecting the memorial to Lee was to pay homage to white supremacy, as in her leftist mind, slavery was the only reason for the Confederacy to exist and to fight. She either doesn't know, or pretends to not know, that white supremacy was as prevalent in the north, that the northern army was not sent South to free slaves but to kill Southerners because they wished to leave the union, and that when push came to shove, the Confederates showed in various ways that they preferred political independence to keeping slavery.
Szakos's pathetic attempts at justifying the soviet-style cleansing of Southern heritage do not pass logical muster. They are totally emotion based, and the emotion is at best contempt and at worst, antipathy. Her attempts to remove the memorial of a man whose character dwarfs those possessed by most social justice warriors must be not only resisted, but defeated.
~Connie Chastain
Connie Chastain is a ninth-generation Southerner. Born in Georgia, she grew up a preacher's kid in Alabama, attended Alabama Christian College (now Faulkner University) and married a Louisiana boy. She currently resides with hdf husband of 30+ years in L.A., that is, Lower Alabama, aka the Florida Panhandle, which basks in the semi-tropical sun at the very top of the Gulf of Mexico -- America's Mediterranean.
She is a former staff writer for The Florida Sun, (renamed the Independent News), which was published in Pensacola, Florida starting in 1999 by former Congressman Joe Scarborough (now the star of "Morning Joe" on MS- NBC). Her articles ran the gamut from travel to current events and chemtrails to Bigfoot in Dixie. With four novels and two short stories published, she is also an Indie-publisher, editor, graphic artist, and video producer.
Don't look in the pages of her books for insulting stereotypical portrayals of Southerners. One reason she writes is to honor the good people of her region. Visit her at www.conniechastain.com
6 comments:
When will people who were not born in Virginia nor were any of their ancestors understand that it is Virginia history. Those of us who trace our ancestry to Jamestown and have ancestors who fought in every war this nation has ever been in consider her to be an insult to Virginia's history. What is next removing statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson etc.Not on this native sons watch.
The quote attributed to Lee about monuments had nothing to do with Lee wanting to disrespect the memories of his own soldiers, far from it.
Remember that after the War, the South was financially destitute. The process of rebuilding the South was going to take a great deal of time and effort, and yes money.
Also keep in mind that many of the Confederate monuments build after the War didn't go up for 20 and sometimes even 40 or 50 years because the cost was just too much immediately after the War.
Lee was more concerned with getting the South back on its feet again as soon as possible. I am certain had he lived another decade or so till Reconstruction ended and the South had more-or-less recovered, he wouldn't have objected to monuments for the honored dead anymore than the other Confederate generals and leaders had been. Lee certainly never objected to displays honoring the graves of the dead.
This was not about snubbing the fallen at all.
One quote misinterpreted by an honesty-challenged, anti-Confederate dolt is hardly reason to eradicate tributes and monuments to a leader respected by this Nation for well over a century. There are far more important quotes.
“Here in the North, forgetting that the time was when the sword of Robert Edmund Lee was drawn against us - forgetting and forgiving all the years of bloodshed and agony - we have long since ceased to look upon him as the Confederate leader, but have claimed him as one of ourselves; have cherished and felt proud of his military genius as belonging to us; have recounted and recorded his triumphs as our own; have extolled his virtues as reflecting honor upon us - for Robert Edmund Lee was an American, and the great nation which gave him birth would be today unworthy of such a son if she regarded him lightly.
"Never had a mother a nobler son. In him the military genius of America was developed to a greater extent than ever before. ln him all that was pure and lofty in mind and purpose found lodgement. Dignified without presumption, affable without familiarity, he united all those charms of manners which made him the idol of his friends and of his soldiers, and won for him the respect and admiration of the world.” -- The New York Herald October 13 1870
"not to keep open the sores of war"
-When Lee wrote that it was only a few years after the war - not 150 years. And he meant any Civil War related monument, not just Confederate.
I doubt Ms. Szakos or any of the flogger set will want to apply that rule to the Lincoln Memorial, or a monument to Grant or Sherman.
I advocate the removal of Szakos back to her native Ohio.
Can you say paid off.
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