I don't have time for this, so you do you.
The lesson I get from the Civil War is driving past cemeteries most days. Lines of tombstones from the last time Americans couldn't live together in peace. The dead know the truth. No amount of idiocy on the interwebs, or might makes right, or cowardly despotism can rewrite their history.
The title of this thread is "Should All Traces of the Confederacy Be Gone?" The very notion is moronic. If this was done, what story would be told? That men died by the thousands to defeat...nothing? An empty void? That the reason the Civil War was fought was: {insert what ever fuckery modern day assholes want to project onto the past to justify todays fuckery}?
Or is this current fetish to silence the voices of the past just to cover up truths that are inconvenient for the loathsome would be despots of today? That men on both side fought for their principles and convictions. Fought for their state. For their hearth and home. Fought for many reasons written in words that we can still read today in their writings and letters home. If we want to spend the time and listen.
It seems that people today have forgotten that those men fought each other, but in the end they made peace. They came to live with one another again, even if there were grudges.
Some love to scream "TRAITORS!!!" towards those that fought for the CSA. Seeming to forget how many were pardoned, or perhaps more importantly how few were not pardoned. If these men are once and always traitors, then explain Joe Wheeler to me.
I am not going to take sides. I live the world that is the legacy of those men, all of them, north and south. It's not my place to judge these men, and I think it is presumptuous of anyone a century and half after the fact to do so.
Judge not, that ye be not judged.
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.