Home is where the truth should live
Loving America enough to be honest about its past
Mary Custis Lee feared in May 1861 that her home overlooking Washington from the hills of Arlington would “become a field of carnage.” Her husband, Robert E. Lee, had gone to Richmond after resigning from the Army to fight for the Confederacy. Before the war’s end, their estate became Arlington National Cemetery.
160 years later, I watch a video of what a friend calls General Lee’s final retreat as his statue rolls on a flatbed truck to its new home in storage after being taken down in Charlottesville, four years after a white supremacist rally where neo-Nazi James Alex Fields, Jr. plowed his car into a crowd of peaceful protesters and murdered Heather Heyer.
On July 9, the fierce and brilliant Malcolm Kenyatta, openly gay candidate for the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania, replied to an attack by the National Republican Senatorial Committee calling him a far-Leftist (a label they apply to all Democrats), “Aww, thanks guys! But I won’t be taking any advice on how to secure our democracy from insurrectionists and the sedition-curious.”
Kenyatta is spot-on. The security fence around the U.S. Capitol is down, but the insurrectionists are as unrepentant as they are incoherent. They call their violence patriotism while blaming others and posing as victims. The right-wing Supreme Court, meanwhile, has further gutted the Voting Rights Act. Like Malcolm, we must fight the enemies of democracy with the truth.
Too many Democrats, despite holding Congress by the thinnest of threads, seem to think they can ignore or politely reason with seditionist bigots and the grifting opportunists who exploit them. No. Republicans are calling Democrats America-haters and playing to white racist fears in their ongoing effort to divide and rule.
By contrast, conservative David French writes in Time, “We should approach history with a sense of curiosity and security. You won’t make me hate my home. You can, however, motivate me to preserve what is pristine and repair what is broken. You can make me proud of the beauty and sorry for the injustice.”
The battle for America takes many forms. Associated Press recently reported, “Wisconsin bishop takes rare step of removing defiant priest.” The errant priest was a right-wing fanatic. He said, among other things, that Catholics cannot be Democrats and that anyone who supports Democrats will burn in hell. Meanwhile, many Catholic bishops want to deny Communion to President Biden because he supports abortion rights. The Archbishop of Washington, Wilton Cardinal Gregory, has made it clear he intends to do no such thing.
Bullies are at work, but so are those resisting them.
Getting our fight on does not mean running ourselves into the ground. I try not to yell at the TV news too much because I don’t want my neighbors pounding on the wall for me to shut up. One thing I do is watch Turner Classic Movies. Last week I saw Ronald Colman and Greer Garson in the 1942 film Random Harvest, about a veteran suffering amnesia. At breakfast outside Trio Restaurant on Saturday, friends and I watched men walking by and discussed a pileup of cyclists at the Tour de France.
The 2022 midterms are only sixteen months away. We don’t have time for amnesia about the threat to our country. We can combine self-care with working to defeat the GOP, which has devolved into a personality cult that steals power while refusing to address America’s problems.
As David French writes, “History lessons shouldn’t be designed to create patriots. They should be designed to educate citizens.” Yes. General Lee’s “final retreat” reminds me of a wreath-laying at the Tomb of the Unknowns on Memorial Day decades ago, when I stood with gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny on that same Arlington hill to honor all of our country’s war dead, including sexual minority servicemembers.
I also remember walking at Annapolis harbor on a warm spring day a few years back behind a Naval cadet who was shimmying up and down to music from a shop he was passing. I blurted out, “Work it while you got it, honey.” He and his friends, instead of reacting with anger, laughed delightedly.
Let’s remind ourselves and one another: We won, we won, our country is much the better for it, and we are not going back.
Richard J. Rosendall is a writer and activist at rrosendall@me.com.
Copyright © 2021 by Richard J. Rosendall. All rights reserved.
