Durham of my youth was a sleepy town, seldom in the news.  This changed with the advent of the Civil Rights movement of the mid 1960s.  Durham was in the news recently.  A crowd demonstrating against the implicit racism of the Trump administration pulled down the statue of the confederate solder that has stood in front of the old courthouse since the dedication of the statue in 1924.

I remember seeing the statue memorializing those who fought for the Lost Cause on many visits to downtown as a kid.  Later as a middle-aged adult I had a more focused interest in the statue.  I was briefly a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.  My great-uncle Thomas was a Confederate soldier.  Uncle Thomas received a serious head wound at Kelly’s Ford Virginia.  He never recovered from the wound.

Here is my photo of the pedestal where the statue of Johnny Reb once stood.  The inscription on the pedestal reads “in memory of the boys who wore the gray.”

It is not unusual to remember our part in a cause that was unjust and murderous with a patina of nostalgia and faux victimization.  Those who wore the grey were not innocent boys.  They were men, who like all of us find it difficult to resist joining with our fellows –even when the cause is to sustain chattel slavery.  An entire economy was based upon the ownership of human beings whose labor was extracted, until no more was left to extract.  The slave then died.

We all die.  The difference was the enslaved person was deprived of the opportunity of a meaningful life, in order to enrich the South.

We tell ourselves cleaned-up-stories of our past when we ought to feel shame, and regret for what we have done.  The Civil War was not a glorious honorable defense of States Rights.  It was a devastating experience of murder and ruin especially for the South.  North Carolina lost 30,000 troops half from battle deaths and half to disease.  This photo of the aftermath of Cold Harbor honestly and directly tells the story of the meaning of the war to the South.

Durham is certainly not the sleepy manufacturing town that it was when I was a child.  Nor is our country today socially the same as it was at the turn of the century, not that long ago.  There is an incipient racism in the hard-edged policies of the Trump administration.  Law is regarded as a weapon to be used against those of racial and ethnic heritage that are felt  inferior by the uber-affluent class that is desperate to maintain their illusion of control.  It is reasonable that the crowd that gathered to pull down the statue of the confederate soldier did so as a gesture of symbolic defiance.

Should we not ask ourselves what have we learned from the Civil War, from Hiroshima, from the Vietnam War?  What have we learned about ourselves?  What have we admitted?  What is the truth about us?

Though you will not be able to read the words at the bottom of the round seal of the Confederacy that is depicted on the pedestal, the words DEO VINDICE are carved in the stone.  “God will vindicate” was the sincere conviction of those who fought for the lost cause.  Such words are of collective self-deception.

The empty pedestal, the absence of the confederate soldier statue is an opportunity on offer: a gift of truth, silently, mercifully offered.