R. E. Lee is not PC

[saltheart]

Very well said, Mark. I'm a life-long northerner (Massachusetts), and also have little reason to sympathize. But history is still history. And It's our history, whether we like it or not.

 

I would also agree with TwoCubDad.

 

We seem to be approaching the precipice where our history will become little more than feel-good and sterile. And it will not be only those we percieve now a "evil" that will be removed from the public view and speech. It will be those for whom we've held high regard. Witness the very recent debacle here in Massachusetts where a vocal few sought to have the team name for UMASS teams changed from "Minutemen" to "Wolves". Wolves have very little to do with our state history, human or natural. Minutemen have everything to do with our history. But...

 

The Minuteman was white. And so the vocal few object. The Minuteman was male. And so the vocal few object. And the Minuteman has a gun. So the objections multiply. Fortunately, cooler and clearer thinking head prevailed. But why did we get to that precipice at all?

 

I have this fear that down the road a piece, the public objection to those like Lee may translate to even more sterile school books where some, like Lee, will be removed altogether. But the masses will feel so much better.

 

Sad that we have chosen to trod that path.

[Wallace]

I am going to step over the line now so avert your eyes...

Tie this thread to the Dade County thread and...

 

If only it could be proven that Lee was gay,

(with revisionist history we can prove just about anything now-a-days) then the local United Way could pay for the flags and patches revision.

[Zahnada]

I would like to respond to a short comment Ed made. "PC & Scouting don't mix. Nor should they."

 

I understand what you're saying and I in part agree. Someone will always be offended no matter what the situation and so complete PC is impossible. I would hate for all of America's enemies and their motives to be omitted from history (much like how the Japanese attempt to forget WWII).

 

However, I feel this is a very self-destructive attitude. While Boy Scouts cannot please everyone (they've proven that in recent years) we must to sensitive to issues. I fear the Boy Scouts can be too conservative at times and this prevents them from evolving and changing as time changes (and I don't just mean the gay debate).

 

Anyway, I have a feeling my ramblings have indeed started to ramble so I will withdraw now. If you can't see my point, then it's ok. I don't know if I have one.

[Zahnada]

Quick question: What if a council (and there may be one out there) has a Confederate flag on their patch? What do you do?

[Twocubdad]

The CSA National flag or the Confederate battle flag? (Sorry, wrong bulletin board.)

 

Actually, quite a few councils used the Confederat battle flag. East Carolina Council's early CSPs were basically Confederate battle flags with the council name superimposed. Lee, Jackson and (I think) one or two Mississippi councils used CSA flags in their patches. There are collectors who specialize in Confederate-themed Scout patches.

 

To my knowledge, all these designs have now been retired.

[fboisseau]

I live in the Robert E. Lee council area and my family has been here since before the Civil War. I see this more as a problem if ignorance of history then being PC. This came to my attention recently when I started thinking about where most of the parents on my son's soccer team are from here originally. The only parents on the team whose families are from Virginia originally where my wife, me and maybe 1 other. Everyone else is form another state and was not taught Virginia history like I was. When I was growing up here you learned a lot about the original settlements, the revolutionary war, and the civil war and you learned about the people involved. Most people from outside of Virginia and other southern states learn very little if anything about these subjects from what I have seen. This is not to meant as a slight about history that is taught in other states it is just a fact, just like I can tell you very little about the history of Nevada. Each state teaches their students about their states history. And as I thought about this I realized that the South has kept a lot of the history alive and correct for along time. For example how many of you can recall the major generals in WWI and what were all the issues that war was fought about. There is an old saying that history is written by the winners and this is true. The south has been more successful then other loser in keeping their history alive. With today's mobile society, more Virginia families are moving elsewhere and more people from other states are moving here and the new blood have little or no knowledge of the Civil War except what they learn from sound bites.

[eisely]

Going back to Saltheart's post about the Minuteman council...

 

When the Mel Gibson movie "The Patriot" was coming out, there was some commentary about the absence of movies about that period in our history. Think about it. Besides "The Patriot" can you name one movie based on the Revolutionary War that you have seen? One commentator suggested that one reason that period was neglected by Hollywood was that our freedom from Britain was won by working class white guys with guns. How much less PC can you get?

 

I hope they keep the Minuteman name for your council.

[dsteele]

I hope they keep the Minuteman name as well. It is a noble name.

 

As far as movies about the revolution, there aren't as many as I would like to see, but I can think of two that do a very good job of explaining the circumstances that led up to it. Those two are Johnny Tremain and 1776. The newly digitalized 1776 just came out recently on DVD and is well worth the 20 bucks or so. I think I've got that thing memorized . . .

 

DS

[scoutldr]

The state (I mean "Commonwealth") flower is the Flowering Dogwood, so how about the Dogwood Council.

 

No, wait...that will offend the cats.

 

How about resurrecting "Old Dominion Council"? That council merged with the Peninsula Council (whose Kecoughtan Lodge flap contained not one, but two Conf Battle Flags) to form the Colonial Virginia Council.

 

Wanna bet how many Scouts and SCouters refuse to give up their REL CSPs in favor of the new ones? Civil Disobedience...a fine patriotic custom.

[eisely]

Cutting back to Massachusetts for a moment - apparently the Boy Scouts were not the only people having difficulty with the Minuteman sympolism. This from the Wall Street Journal...

 

MINUTEMEN RELIEVED:In face of a public backlash, the University of Massachusetts has backed down on plans to drop the school's mascot, the Minuteman. Athletic director Ian McCaw was quoted as telling the Associated Press that the Minuteman logo--a white guy with a gun--not only wasn't cutting it in the lucrative logo market but was plagued with unfortunate "gender, firearms and ethnicity issues." The Massachusetts Daily Collegian editorialized against the change, quoting ESPN's Tony Kornheiser: "Without Minutemen there would be no University of Massachusetts, there would be the University of England at Amherst."

[saltheart]

Ummmm...folks, I think if you go back and re-read my post you'll find that it was the University of Massachusetts (UMASS) that I referred to as being where the name issue lay...not the Minuteman Council. Lord, no. To my knowledge there's no issue there.....yet. And I hope it stays that way.

 

Be that as it may, the point is still the same. There is a move afoot across this country to sterilize our history to be nothing more than "feel good" memories. And that is just a little bit more than scary.

 

Towards the end of my first post, I referred to a fear that school books shall soon be thus homogenized, and students in the future will not learn the same history we (old-timers) learned. It's happening already, in California. The State Board of Education in that state has already undertaken the effort.

 

It's not too hard to see where this may be going.

[evmori]

Zahnada,

I don't consider it a destructive attitude. We can tolerate certain things if the reason for the toleration is rational. But tolerating something just because someone's feeling are hurt isn't a good thing. When people try to turn an organization into a PC organization, they make the organization so wishy-washy it is no longer the organization it was meant to be.

 

Ed Mori

Scoutmaster

Troop 1

1 Peter 4:10

 

[NWScouter]

How history is written and look at is conditional of the time it was written not the time it happens. The Civil War has had many different interpretations. Right after the war the bloody shirt demonized the confederate cause. It wasnt until the turn of the twentieth century that the noble south view became popular.

For example the period right after the Civil war, the time of reconstruction is seen by different historians as a time of greater African American involvement in southern state government as good thing or a time of mismanagement and relief that Jim Crow Laws were enacted to correct that.

The causes of the Civil War will be debated forever. State rights vs. federal power, spread of slavery to the territories, rights of slaves and slave holders in free states, industrial states vs. agricultural states and protective tariffs vs. free trade all are underlining causes.

I wish I could remember the name the book I read a few years ago, but dealt with the roadside history markers and their biases. It showed how you could tell by what time they were erected the slant on history they had. One of the interesting stories he told was in New Mexico. In Santa Fe there is a statue to an early Spanish Governor, with him on horseback. The text praises him for pacify New Mexico. Every few years it seems that it right foot and sometimes the horse foot turn up missing. He most note worthy undertaking was the pacification of native village by cutting off all the males right feet. It sdeems that most history has two sides if not more.

 

[KoreaScouter]

When we lived in Virginia, we learned that our kids' elementary school was named after a Confederate Army Colonel, who got killed in a battle nearby. There were several other things nearby that bore his name (reservoir, street, etc). Nobody cared, and our school was as diverse as they come.

 

As a mildly humorous aside, there's a beautiful area of Richmond lined with statues of Confederate leaders. If memory serves, it's official name is "Monument Boulevard". The transplanted Yankees have unofficially renamed it "Loser Street". My apologies to SST3RD...

 

KS

[Twocubdad]

Easy there, big fellow, you're going to start something.

 

Reminds me of the yankee who asked his southern friend, "When are youse guys going to quit fighting the Civil War?"

 

"I don't know," the Southerner said, "Maybe when y'all yankees quit shooting at us."