In many ways, the struggle over Confederate statues is one of the significant moral issues facing our country in this time of moral decisions.

I write about it because’s it’s interesting and a valuable example of how this election will be shaped and fought over across the country.

It’s another of those issues that shows us the vast gap that splits our country in two.

These issues also speak to how Donald Trump intends to campaign this year and hopes to win, using tactics and strategies that have worked before. Trump’s immorality is his morality and the morality of many of his followers. Each side is incomprehensible to the other.

Progressives have a long and unfortunate history of branding people who disagree with them as idiots and bigots. The Republicans have become a party of extremes.

Many of the people fighting for the statues see themselves not as racists but as cultural and political rebels, once again being maligned by liberals and elitists, wrongly portrayed by the media,  and defended only by the President.

The President is on the ropes. His callousness in subjecting his followers to danger and even death in Tulsa for no good reason was another monumental miscalculation, it has greatly damaged his image and his cause.

Two more campaign aides who worked in Tulsa are sick. They tested positive for COVID-19, health officials reported, bringing the total to eight. The two were in the arena the night of the rally.

The lawsuits are coming next.

The President is basing his campaign on moral issues – athletes kneeling at sporting events, black people taking to the streets and threatening order, abortion, judges who support “morality,” defending the police,  immigrants taking our jobs,  and raping women.

The Confederate Statues are a guidepost to how the election will evolve. If we consider them, we can understand the election.

Like a lot of creative people, I squirm when I see mobs of people tearing down the work of artists from a different time and context than the time we live in. The President has embraced this as a “wedge” issue, a defilement of our history and culture.

Give Trump some points, he is consistent,  staying true to his playbook by channeling Richard Nixon and George Wallace, the other two other notable dividers of our time.

They both invoked disorder and chaos and both stroked fears of people of color, in this country, and from the outside.

But these times are very different. This statue fight occurs against the backdrop of the racial upheaval spreading across the country, and unprecedented sympathy for it by white Americans.

I am, like so many people, struggling with how to respond to this even bigger moral challenge of 2020: the black rage and frustration with white people and the police, and the legacy of slavery and oppression.

The killing of George Floyd has gotten our attention, the question is, for how long and in what way? And has it truly upended the campaign for the Presidency?

The Floyd killing and response is different. It h as having shocked and penetrated our society in an unprecedented way, across rural and urban, and black and white lines. The guys having coffee at the convenience store are getting sick of Donald Trump.

They were stunned by the video of Floyd dying.

An African-American friend, a writer, told me he was sick of white people telling him that they weren’t racists when we all have accepted and tolerated the most brutal and endemic kinds of racism for centuries.

I have no sound or wise answer to that.

My idea of dealing with this is to listen. I think this is a time to listen, not to tell.

An African-American father wrote an op-ed piece a few months ago describing how he felt when he and his son walked to school together in Virginia, passing a statue every day of Robert E. Lee, the general who fought so well and skillfully to preserve slavery in America.

He said it made him sick and furious and ashamed to see this every day, and his son was devastated by it. He felt helpless to protect him.

The child, then 11, couldn’t understand why white people would build a giant statue to a traitor who tried to destroy the country and defend slavery.

Eventually, he and his son walked miles out of their way to go around it.

This got me to practice some empathy – with this story; I could walk in the father’s shoes and imagine my child and me trying to have that conversation.

I can’t defend anything that is so offensive and hurtful to so many people as those statues are. One way or another, they just have to go.

The hurt of African-Americans on this issue is enough for me, I don’t need to hear more.

It’s interesting to note that Robert E. Lee himself never wanted these statues built:

“I think it wiser,” the retired Lee wrote about a proposed Gettysburg memorial in 1869, “…not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”

Those statues keep those feelings raw and festering. People can celebrate their culture in many less disturbing ways.

Former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu (2010-2018) is perhaps the most eloquent public official to call for the statue’s removal. He fought to remove them from his city for years.

“Our battlefield is on the street and in the heart,” he wrote.” The mass shootings in churches, schools, movie theaters, and malls are the opposite face of the same coin: too many guns, too little preventive intervention. This is (the statues) a mental health issue, a security issue, and the greatest moral issue in America today. Where are the voices of our religious leaders, calling down the failure of legislators and government to face this blight? If this is not a pro-life issue, what on God’s earth is it?”

These women were among the true heroes of the protests following the Floyd killing; they are bringing competence, calm morality, empathy – and courage – back into our political system.

It is wrong for the media and “progressives” to dismiss everyone who wants the statues to stay as a bigot or white nationalist. Their culture relishes rebellion and defiance, their attachment to these statues often goes way beyond racism.

But still, I can’t get comfortable with mobs of people tearing statues down and destroying them.

I got a message on my blog posts today from a woman named Nancy, and I was touched by her message:

“You said, “If we eliminate all of the art in the world that was inspired by war (I was writing about Etsy’s censorship of artists who explore the Pandemic), tragedy, disease, or death, we will empty our great museums of some of their best works. “
I completely agree and will take it a step further by saying that removing all the confederate statues, as well as other statues, is also a rejection of the work of those artists who made them. I understand that the people commemorated by those statues are offensive in the minds of many, but maybe there is a safe place to store them as artwork, thus keeping from destruction their reflection of a specific period of history.
I am reminded of the Buddhas of Bamyan, which were carved in the 6th century, and which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 for being idols. They had their own reasons, as do the protesters now, but the end result is the loss to the world of artistic expression.”

I liked Nancy’s message, and I appreciate its balance and gentleness. There was a lot of wisdom in it.

Artists never like to see art destroyed for any reason, and the analogy of the Taliban destroying those Buddhas isn’t entirely off the mark.

The Taliban soldiers also thought they were on the right side of morality by destroying ancient artworks they found offensive. Destroying things and reducing them to rubble, is not in itself a moral thing to do.

So what would I do about the statues?

I think one of two things has to happen to them: they should be removed immediately and stored in safe places and out of sight until society – black and white – can figure out how and if they can be used for good and if the country is mature enough to re-define them.

Or two: they should remain but be used as educational tools – local museums –  to remind people what slavery was, how brutal and inhuman it was, how relevant and current it’s legacy is.

The statues can also help us to fess up to the fact that we have lied about it and hid from it for centuries. The father walking his kid to school would be happy to walk past a statue like that.

They could remind us of slavery, rather than glorify it, and help educate a country that has never really confronted this cancer right in the hearts of the nation.

Every one of those statues could be used to tell a story of slavery, of emancipation, and our failed efforts to face up to our history. Re-imagined, they could stop glorifying the Confederacy and help Americans see and grasp what evil slavery was.

I’m ready to listen, not preach. Here is a precious opportunity to teach.

“These statues are not just stone and metal,” said Landrieu in a speech in New Orleans. “They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy, ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.”

Put that way; the statues could be preserved – some of them are amazing works of art – to tell the truth, something so rarely done in our country when it comes to race.

“The statues were symbols,” said Landrieu. “Symbols matter. We use them in telling the stories of our past and who we are, and we chose them carefully. Once I learned the real history of these statues, I knew there was the only path forward, and that meant making straight what was crooked, making right what was wrong. It starts with telling the truth about the past.”

That is a promising place for us to start in the year of George Floyd. But Trump has very deliberately rejected truth as a value. He just wants to win.

The confederate statue controversy has once again been used to split America, as will a score of other issues in this election year, from student loans to poverty to police brutality.

Landrieu, like Nancy, was open to taking these statues down respectfully and peacefully – they are all someone’s art, and important symbols of culture to others, however much I might disagree.

We can respect other people’s culture even when reject it.  We don’t have to turn them into demons to disagree with them and challenge them.

The people who say they are progressive have a tough time learning this lesson.

I  get uneasy at the new American habit of “disappearing” people and things we don’t like or have come to outgrow or reassess. I have never seen a mob I liked or trusted.

The Confederate Statues are kicking off the campaign, one of the first windows into how America might be changing, or if it is really changing at all.

A political fantasy to dream about: some leader, somewhere will come along and use these statues as a way to gain the lost trust of millions of Americans,  and show us how to talk to each other again.

Perhaps he or she might also spark a movement for all of us to finally know the truth about our wonderful country, and let our awful ghosts go home.