Time for Museums to play a role

LET THERE BE MUSEUMS and compassionate memorialization

History is vital to human decision-making, though we all know we cannot walk in the same river twice.  

Let’s fund new museums and venues of the Civil War that preserve the reality with compelling, honest displays, artifacts, and interactive video. A group of  museums that hold these pain-provoking statues will help neutralize the immediate civic issue by permitting viewing choice, removing the obligation to see an object that is thought offensive and intrudes upon citizens' freedom of movement. The narrative of America’s struggle with human liberty would be safer from appropriations and re-definitions of history. 

Museums have authenticity, possessing  “the real things” -  its holdings have an originality which defy commodification.  Museums have the power to prevent anonymity.  They preserve, heal and teach.  Museums grow imagination and connection.  They are seedbeds for wisdom.  Museums are a unique synergy of journalism, biography and history.  They possess a kind of neutrality, set apart as they are.

The Reagan Library is a fine example, as is the Holocaust Museum.  The sacrifices, tragedies, and achievements of the past are summoned for us in museums - just step aboard the U.S.S. Iowa in San Pedro Harbor and smell the gritty innards, gaze at the massive power of its long guns, and see for yourself.  

Free speech is an American right, but violent protest defiles and destroys the history of our ancestors who died on slave ships or fought in the Civil War - south and north. Their lives need not, and should not be degraded.We do not have the right to remake our heritage.  We have the obligation to understand it, as humans and citizens. 

Protestors who deny or distort the past are corrupting and destroying their own rights and freedoms.  We need to save them from themselves as well as ourselves.  For terrorists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members, I pray that economic and educational opportunities come to them, and offer them an exit from the hellish place in which they live and breathe.

Let the rest of us gather around  informed memorialization.