Regarding The Flap Over Confederate Statues

[Rev. Rye]

Like it or not, for a society to cohere, you need buy-in from its members. These statues seem to work against that. Your complaints against feelings notwithstanding, it is only rational to consider that too.

Very good point, Thumpy. I would not argue with that.

However, there's one thing to add: Confederate memorials are only a part of the things working against people buying into society. We have a political party (that controls the White House, both houses of Congress, and even the Supreme Court) that seems hell-bent on denying minority groups access to the mainstream of society as much as they're willing to get away with, up to and including revoking the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which allowed the 15th Amendment to actually be enforced in the Deep South. The Democratic Party is kind of slow to act, and this is leading to more disillusion with the political system. And add into this the many, MANY squabbles between the many left-leaning groups looking to change things for the better (which, admittedly, has more impact on the internet than the real world, with the possible exception of radicalising the right because they use it as an excuse to be worse to match the ineffectual groups), the picture is clear: American society as it stands is Balkanized. There's no borders you can draw on a map, but the effect is much the same: lots of in-fighting within groups, people no longer seem interested in looking past their differences and finding common ground and fighting for that, and most importantly, nothing gets changed. Why, yes, that does suck.

There are loads of things that can undermine societal buy-in, including the fact that police officers can kill people for spurious reasons and suffer no legal consequences whatsoever (especially if they belong to a minority); seriously, just look at any of Min's Fucking Cops threads for case studies in this. Even if we took down all the Confederate memorials (which I have to admit would certainly not be the end of the world unless we have more alt-right jackasses converging on the sites like in Charlottesville trying to make it so), in terms of societal buy-in, it's a mere drop in the bucket. I suppose removing them from public property will make us feel better about ourselves, but I can't be sure if it will do much else.