The Direction of Intention

“The “Lost Cause” is a revisionist narrative that emerged in the American South after the Civil War to romanticize the Confederacy and justify secession. It falsely claims the war was fought over “states’ rights” rather than slavery, portrays slavery as a benign institution, and asserts that Confederate defeat was caused solely by Union advantages in resources and manpower.” ~ EBSCO

In 2023 I wrote a play entitled DIORAMA that explores our nation’s inability to deal honestly with our history. Even after all of my research and immersion into the topic, I have been agog at the lengths the current administration has gone in the past 18 months to whitewash our history in order to reinvigorate The Lost Cause narrative. White supremacy cannot face the mirror of history so must selectively distort, assault and/or eliminate fact and truth.

Last week Stephen Miller labeled progressives – or anyone who does not agree with his white nationalism – as less than human. We were witness to the president of the United States call the democrats and progressives “a danger to our democracy” and dust off the tired-old-chicken-little-cry: liberals are communists! It would be sad and laughable if history had not taught us of the dangers of desperate dictators and their nationalist sycophants.

As we have previously written, a storm recently broke our mighty maple tree. Kerri’s relationship with this guardian reaches back nearly 40 years. She has a long and precious history with this gentle giant. I have only had a fragment of that time but felt deeply the loss of this near-century old spirit. It is part of our history. As I watched the crew quickly take it down, I couldn’t help but think about how long it took to grow. It seemed unfair how rapidly it was removed.

Destruction is easy. Growth takes time, nurturing, patience. Perseverance.

A healthy history – a healthy nation – relies on the strength of its roots – all of its roots. The rings preserve and tell the story of the good, the bad and the ugly. To attempt to cut out the bad and the ugliness of manifest destiny, slavery, the trail of tears…to eliminate the rings of diversity, suffrage, the struggle for civil rights…is to badly weaken the tree. Kill the history and you kill the root. Kill the root and the democracy will not survive. And that is precisely why they attack our history. To be successful, an authoritarian regime needs to weaken and then cut down the tree of democracy. Systematically. Efficiently. And the fastest route to dismemberment of democracy is to amputate its history, eliminate entirely the struggle for equality.

Of course, like our tree, they can remove the exhibits from the institutions, they can fire women and people of color, they can vilify DEI, they can ban books and force universities to suspend programs of study…but that will never cancel the truth of the history of our nation. It lives in us as powerfully as the history of our tree lives in Kerri.

The Nazis made the same mistake as did the Daughters of the Confederacy when they concocted their Lost Cause narrative. Whitewash only temporarily covers the substance; it is not the substance. We the people hold the history, not a made-up curriculum. History is lived.

We-the-people are the “burning point of our ancestral ship”and history teaches us that sooner or later, given enough time, these scrubbers of history, these fearmongers, will eventually scrub themselves. They will become a single ring in our tree, a marker of a bad time, a forest fire that we survived and transcended. A moment in time that ultimately made our democracy stronger and, hopefully, a ring that marks the time when we finally faced – without fear – the complete story of our nation’s history.

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read Kerri’s blogpost about THE STUMP

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Filed under: Edges, Identity, KS Friday, Metaphor, Transcendence, Uncategorized | Tagged: artistry, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, democrat, dictator, fact, history, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, Lost Cause narrative, perseverance, progressive, story, studio melange, the melange, truth, white nationalism |