Political positioners on both sides are on the verge of missing the momentum in this moment if they focus on monuments. We as a country must stay focused. Heather Heyer didn’t risk her life over the removal of a statue. Surely, she saw herself seizing a moment to speak up and stand for equality and she probably could have cared less if Robert E. Lee’s statue watched on. If we focus on monuments and not momentum, the REAL MOMENT for breakthrough will be missed. Let's talk to, work with or call out real people about real time stuff instead of focusing on removing the idols of dead men who no longer carry personal power or the authority to change a thing. It's easy to shout down statues with no tongues. Politicians, thought leaders, influencers must deal with the attitudes and burnished paradigms still being perpetuated since those statues were established. That is the hard work. Let us not give renewed, modern-day power to relics. Distraction is the more formidable enemy here. We must stay focused.
In a compelling, though hard to watch, interview with Vice News' Elle Reeve featured on CNN’s Anderson Cooper, she reveals about 45 seconds into the segment that while the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue was the official rallying point of the Unite the Right rally, really it served as an unofficial, and very convenient opportunity to convene in order to raise the profile, voices, and legitimacy of the Alt-Right movement. If statues were not dumb, deaf and blind, I imagine General Lee would have voiced his own protest at being so completely ignored by the organizers of an event supposedly in his honor! But the supremacists were thinking beyond monuments. They were focused on starting a paradigm shift, forcing a new mindset of extreme racism and pure hatred for non-whites. Maybe with that increased visibility there was also hope of engendering some fear in the hearts of those who dared to oppose them.
Instead, people showed up to stand against it all, fearlessly. Charlottesville was our nation’s tipping point. It didn’t take Maxwell’s prescribed 10,000 hours, only a little more than 200 days to get the nation finally coming to center ground to stand on similar ideology, a moment for greatness. This is the nation’s all-important Restorative Chance.
Then why now are politicians seizing this moment to focus on razing monuments? Could it be that in an effort to look politically brave at a time when the rest of the world seems to be banning together to call out a wayward president, some are missing the chance to do something of more profound significance by opting to do something that could give them brownie points in the short memories of voters. Could we be wasting this intense period of hard, painful, but eye-opening discussion by going after good optics leading into 2018 elections? Life-changing bipartisan legislation could be birthed from this moment. But it may not see the light of day, losing out to photo-ops that make us look like we felled an institution when we really we only felled the symbol of the institution.
The world is finally listening with red hot ears to voices once quelled, invited now to speak plainly and without interruption. It’s an opportunity for organizations like Black Lives Matter, who have often had their mission and message hijacked by both sympathizing and opposing forces, to reset for maximum clarity and effectiveness. In the last several days, people once baffled by the mere existence of black Republicans have finally heard them share their passion for conservatism, but a disdain for the pallor of racism that is attempting to fully hijack the Republican party once and for all. We are finally not rolling our eyes at our black friends who we once thought were slightly paranoid because of their insistence that racism at this ugliest of levels still exists. We have heard white sportscasters explain how difficult it is to know in your heart that you're not racist, but then dare to disagree on the fine points of an issue or situation and you're automatically dumped back into Hillary Clinton’s "basket of deplorables". We have seen tv personalities on both sides of the aisle cry of bewilderment, finally ready to talk to their fellow pundits and not at them. Staunch opponents from both major parties are using the same unifying bulletin points for once. How then could we downshift to the task of removing statues that have long been forgotten mostly by the people they should offend most?
The exception to this argument is the quest for the removal of the Confederate flag, whose presence does not simply represent a passing historical moment in time, but an entire era defined by the physical and mental oppression, abuse and murder of an entire people that still has lingering effects today. It also is the symbol of a nation once and currently almost irrevocably divided. When a black person encounters that symbol on a t-shirt, or flying on the back of a truck or hanging by the front doors of homes, it reads like, “I still wish you were a slave”. To continue to fly it is the equivalent of continuing to officially fly the Nazi flag in Germany which would sound like, “We still wish we could gas you”. It is not American to be okay with causing that level of suspicion about the value of one’s own life in the heart of his neighbor.
But for a second, let’s lay aside the Confederate era and the Nazi regime, let’s tune out those people obsessed with reliving eras they never lived through in the first place just long enough to see this climactic moment through to completion. Ears are now being divinely tuned to the frequency of justice, civility and dialogue, a much welcomed change from the atmosphere of injustice, mean-spiritedness and division.
Now is not the time to position these moments for political gain, but rather we must position this momentum for permanent breakthrough.