Erasing history

[Bill Richter]

The trouble with history is that it rarely pleases both or all sides, unless one wishes to remove conflict and build consensus. That's what happens in modern ecumenical religion. We forget why people divided and died over things that are deemed unimportant by those with the biggest megaphones nowadays. The South and the Confederacy have fallen accordingly. It is like Neil Simon or my mentor on my Master's Thesis (a man from Indiana) arriving in WW II Camp Shelby Mississippi only to find that the North did not win the war down thataway. I know of no way that Nathan Bedford Forrest can be pleasing to all races or all points of view, unless one culture is destroyed by the other. Similarly, the Dutch are ashamed that thousands served in the Waffen SS in WW II. They get around it by ignoring it, just like we do with our own cultural differences. Hence down come the cultural monuments deemed honorable to some and "bad" by someone else with more current political pull. That is erasing history.