Ignorance
We are in Louisville Kentucky. It’s a week before the running of the Derby. The town is in festival mode, special events are in progress, Mother Nature is doing her best with pleasant weather. The sidewalks are crowded on Bardstown Road. Our AirBnB is just a around the corner. I found a spot at the Safai Coffee Shop and this cup of dark roast coffee is uncommonly delicious this morning.
Our daughter and her partner live in Louisville. It is a delight to visit, especially in the early springtime. To help you imagine how fine spring can be in the South I took this photo of a pink dogwood in bloom. Many of these trees bloom in the front yards up and down the street. An example of Nature’s bounty, offered to the eye. Imagine that Mother Nature greets us with a serving tray of visual treats for the taking.
Yesterday we spent time at the Cherokee Park Art Fair. I loved it. Parallel streets running through the park were lined with display booths of art work on both sides of the street. Work was presented by artists from Kentucky and surrounding States, who were eager to discuss anything at all about their work. The walk through the art fair was several hours of 
intensely rich experience. I felt that my heart and mind were expanded to a better appreciation of beauty and meaning at the conclusion of our time there.
I caught this moment of a potter demonstrating his work by inviting children to sit with him. The small hand in his, the child feels the sensuous texture of the clay, wet and flowing through his or her fingers on the spinning wheel. Is this not how it is with art? The magic, the mystery of the child is awakened in us when we touch something that causes us to wonder.
A darker note was struck for me while in Cherokee Park. There is a imposing life-sized statue of a figure of a man on a horse at the entry to the park. The figure is erect in the saddle, the rider and the animal displaying a dignity, strength of presence. The statue 
is of John Breckenridge Castleman a native Kentuckian. Castleman is from the nineteenth century, born 1841, died 1918. The inscription reads: erected in 1913 by friends who loved and respected him as a noble patriot, a gallant soldier, a useful citizen and an accomplished gentleman. Castleman was a Major in the Army of the Confederacy.
The statue is also striking due to a smear of orange paint thrown in protest by someone, or somebodies wishing to make a statement repudiating the recent killing of people of color by law enforcement officers. Black Lives Matter. Viewing the statue I felt sadness in the certainty that ignorance and violence were opposite sides of the same coin. The vandalized statue is a icon of the terrible paradox, the contradiction that is inscribed in the soul of the language-using-upright-walking-bipedal animal.
My recent ancestors in the 1860’s fought a devastating, unimaginable to us, four years of war to sustain the practice of slavery. The wealth of the South was derived from slavery. It is impossible to deny that many were honorable, productive citizens. Enmeshed in the momentum of events of their time, they engaged in four years of mutual murder, known as the War Between the State.
So here we are. There is no denying that law officers who have shot down individuals of color found themselves in a circumstances of intense stress. I assume they also were good husbands, faithful to their friends, and dutiful citizens. Yet, a trigger was pulled successively until the clip was empty–a young man lay dying in the street, in a automobile, or in an apartment. These events are no longer rare, infrequent.
Friends we must step away from the brink. We must find a way to tamp down, to reduce the impetus toward conflict. I understand the imperative of making a statement. I doubt that defacing a monument to a man and a time that we cannot understand is helpful. Can we talk? Can we listen? Can we ask ourselves if it is possible to conceive of society differently? Conceive of work, of commerce that is collaborative, less violent, more just? Can we turn away from individuals, from parties purveying ignorance and violence, that scapegoat people of color?
We must. Or we will be dragged over the edge.
3 thoughts on “Ignorance”
Stepping out on a limb here, but my sense is that even though slavery was the leading issue that provoked the Civil War, it was not the only reason. The cultural division between north and south ran deep and well beyond the economics of slavery. The bulk of Johnny Rebs who took up arms against their northern brethren were not slave owners, but they did not care for Yankees – period! There was a southern way of life that may have depended on enslaved laborers, but the residents of the southern states also felt the heel of northern arrogance. At times we mask over the other side of the rebel coin because the issue of slavery was so abhorrent to the sensibilities of the Connecticut gentleman farmer. Everything should be kept in perspective and political correctness sometimes blinds us to seeing the nuances woven into the social fabric of a culture that seems foreign to us. Please understand that in no way am I advocating a return to those times. What I’m attempting to say is that although defacing a statue may be a statement, it is not carried out with a full understanding of the historical motivations for a southerner to have taken up arms. Nothing is solely black & white – literally.
You succinctly describe the antipathy between the Southern planters and those who lived in say, Connecticut. In 1856 there was famous incident, The Brooks-Sumner affair, wherein, Representative Preston Brooks (D-SC) used a walking cane to attack Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA), an abolitionist, in retaliation for a speech given by Sumner two days earlier in which he fiercely criticized slaveholders including a relative of Brooks. Sumner nearly died from the beating.
As you indicated, a lot was going on in the run up to the Civil War of which nothing was black and white.
War made everything black and white. You were on one side or the other.
Much as today. Apparently we never learn.