I Wonder How We Will View This In Ten Years

There is a bit of mob hysteria going on right now about the Confederate battle flag. It is not the Confederate flag–it is not even the ‘stars and bars,’ although it is occasionally called that by people who do not know the history of the flag.

Yesterday I attended a meeting of the House Homeland Security, Miltary, and Veterans Affairs Committee in the North Carolina Legislative Building. The meeting was chaired by Representative Michael Speciale from Craven County. WRAL.com posted an article about this meeting. I have included a link to their article although the article is totally misleading.

First of all, I would like to say that this committee meeting had nothing to do with any of the ruckus that is currently ongoing about Confederate flags and memorabilia. The Bill was originally filed in the North Carolina Senate on February 3rd of this year. The purpose of the Bill is to set up a standard procedure for preserving historic items from North Carolina’s history. There were people in the meeting who tried to make this a discussion of the Confederate battle field and other civil war items, but that is not what the Bill is about.

The article at WRAL did report one important comment made during the meeting:

But Rep. Larry Pittman, R-Cabarrus, compared efforts to remove Confederate monuments to George Orwell’s novel 1984.

“History needs to be retained. You don’t know what you are without your history,” Pittman argued. “We need to face it and, like it or not like it, it is what it is, and we shouldn’t be trying to change it. And I don’t think the government has the right to change what history is.”

The Bill will be voted on by the North Carolina House of Representatives next Tuesday. The Bill easily passed the Senate in April, but that was before the insanity started. It is truly sad that many Americans wants to erase our history rather than learn from it.

As Representative Speciale noted, “This bill has nothing to do with what’s happened over the Confederate flag. But I think that’s a good reason why we need something like this to stave off the flames of passion. Because once an item is destroyed, an item is removed, a historical item, it’s gone.”

We need to preserve our past, learn from it, and move on. Destroying it accomplishes nothing.