George Washington did NOT sleep here

BREAKING NEWS

A statue of Robert E. Lee was removed from its pedestal in Virginia’s capital. It was one of the nation’s largest Confederate monuments.

Wednesday, September 8, 2021 9:11 AM EST

The Lee statue was erected in 1890, the first of six Confederate monuments — symbols of white power that dotted the main boulevard in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy. On Wednesday, it was the last of them to be removed.

Truly, I do not have mixed feelings about this. A monument to the Confederacy and our heroes, even our topmost hero, is offensive to many Americans in an era when we need to effect in life, point of view, and cultural memory, what is the determination of Shrove Tuesday in the church and personal spirituality, to confess and do penance, to shrive our lives and homes, minds, hearts, and nation of that which is destructive to self and harmful to others: sin, metaphorically, fat, sugar, leaven. 

We repent of the evil that enslaves us,

the evil we have done,

and the evil done on our behalf.

We need to not cherish things that remind others of when we abused them, and we sure as hell don't need to be calling it "our heritage". 

Yes, but. All the shriving tells me what I Was as a Southerner, and makes me uneasy about what I now Am as a residual Human, that is to say, whether there was any value to the years of my Being. Perhaps serving as a final transitional generation - - of three, in my W case, Pop, my Father, and finally Me - - as America transits from Evil to Hope, Promise, Reality as our attitudes and points of view soften, realize, and change

At least, I feel fairly easy that I have consciously passed none, little or none, of what I grew up "knowing" along to the generations after me. 

What? Life was good in the 1940s and 1950s, but only for me, not for everyone.

And yet I do not like standing here constantly being chastened as one of the bad guys, guilty, the naughty ones, the evil team. I am what I am, I was what I was, my life experience and history has made me all that stands here this morning and I do not dislike it. I have discomfort feeling Politically, Socially, and Morally Corrected yet one more Time again every time I see, or hear of, or read about, anything being done to diminish what General Lee was to us. My own college fraternity, the Kappa Alpha Order, established to preserve Southern values as we thought of them, and yes, a Confederate battle flag hanging over the front entrance, a large portrait of Robert E Lee over the mantle in our main room. The fraternity has forced itself to change. But if the Confederacy is to be gone once, for all time and forever, all those markers need to be disestablished as well. Not simply "repurposed", but lost, lose as Germany legally enforced and continues to enforce losing everything about the Nazi era, the Dylann Roofs need to be extinguished, a felony to display a Confederate battle flag in public. A capital offense of high treason for carrying it into the national capitol.

How deep shall we go? Damned for having relished "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". Damned for, at age thirteen, having laughed in the Ritz Theatre, at a racially or ethnically slanted film scene in "The Three Stooges" or "Gone With The Wind". Jack Benny deposed for his use of Rochester and the Maxwell. Damned for laughing uproariously and "knowingly" with my class as our teacher read to us, aloud after lunch, "Parasols Is For Ladies". Damned that my Cove School class put on blackface minstrel skits and the Interlocutor put us in stitches of laughter. Damned for being horrified, at age ten, when told that our system of segregated schools was being challenged and knowng the correct answer when asked, "Are you for Civil Rights or States Rights?". 

Who and What Am I as figures who were heroes to me, to us as we were, are deemed politically, socially, and morally incorrect, judged monsters, disgraced, stripped of honors and torn down. Leonidas Polk. William Porcher DuBose. Robert E Lee. Nathan Bedford Forrest. 

Soon 

George Washington, president, general of the armies, father of the nation, slave-owner.

 

Paul of Tarsus, "slaves be obedient to your masters". 

Jesus of Nazareth, "nor a slave above his master" among dozens of mentions of slaves in his parables and teaching. NT Greek, δοῦλος is slave, not simply servant as often translated.

In shriving ourselves, how far back in history do we go before we acknowledge that today things are far more different than ever before in human history, that we are all, including Jesus, George Washington, and Robert E Lee, products of our age, and stop tearing down statues, correcting high school names and mascots, removing portraits, changing street signs, and taking down plaques. IDK.

From Merriam-Webster:

We wouldn't want to give the history of shrive short shrift, so here's the whole story. It began when the Latin verb scribere (meaning "to write") found its way onto the tongues of certain Germanic peoples who brought it to Britain in the early Middle Ages. Because it was often used for laying down directions or rules in writing, 8th-century Old English speakers used their form of the term, scrīfan, to mean "to prescribe or impose." The Church adopted scrīfan to refer to the act of assigning penance to sinners and, later, to hearing confession and administering absolution. Today shrift, the noun form of shrive, makes up half of short shrift, a phrase meaning "little or no consideration." Originally, short shrift was the barely adequate time for confession before an execution.

George Washington did NOT sleep here after all.

T