In times of hatred, pain, and injustice, we must seek to be resilient. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln built resilience in less than 300 words in the Gettysburg Address. After Apartheid, Nelson Mandela was the forefront of developing the Truth and Reconcilliation Commision to build resilience among South Africans and come to terms with what happened, not to replace what happened.
With every memory of the past that is torn down, our resilience fades. We seek to eradicate hatred and pain from our lives by stripping our past of the roots of in- justice, a futile practice with unrealistic goals which will only hurt us more. The past cannot be forgotten. The visible wounds may close but the damage has lasting effects. There will always be times when we are downtrodden. If we are resilient we will stand up once again and learn all we can about the situations and people that have hurt us and how we can heal ourselves and others. We must dig a grave and bury the past and, with reverence for the lives lost and the lives that have been broken, place a headstone to mark the site that we may remember to return and converse as we tread lightly on this ground.
To remember the past, we must not lose our resilience; we cannot shy away from what offends us and what makes us afraid. If we cannot look the ugliness of this world in the eye and see it for what it was and still is, we will surely miss the evil that is in front of us. If we have resilience, we will not be overcome by this evil. We must move beyond but not forget. When we seek to re- move part of our country’s past we also seek to remove part of our culture, an action which will only harden the hearts of those who feel their identity is being stripped away.
In 2011, I had the opportunity to visit Nuremberg, Germany and the Deutsches Stadion, the ground where Adolf Hitler stood and rallied support. It is where Wilhelm Frick, Alfred Jodl, and other members of the Nazi Party were hanged. It is a haunting reminder of a time not long ago. Germany has decided to preserve this ground as a reminder of where they were less than 100 years ago. The reminder is to never return to this state again.
Nuremberg is not the only reminder of the Third Reich preserved to keep alive the ghosts that should forever follow us. Concentration camps like Auschwitz have been preserved, their gates held open, resonating death all around. Germany has not forgotten the past, and neither should we. When we seek to remove statues of Confederate soldiers, we are pretending they did not exist, a lie many wish was true. The Civil War is part of our history; we are a country that allowed slavery. We need statues to haunt us; we need to tremble when we tread on ground where blood has been spilled, no matter whose blood it is.
We must also remember that our rights as Americans are not specific to one culture or one ideology. We live in a country where we have the freedom to pro- test actions that we disagree with. Just as we have a right to march on Washington in protest of our government’s lack of action to address the issues of gun control and mass shootings, the groups of white nationalists protesting the removal of the statue in Charlottesville were protected under the same right. When we take away their right and keep it for ourselves, we have discarded democracy and attempted a coup on the freedoms we often take for granted in this country, rendering civil war more futile than before.
This is not to say that nothing should be done about the racism that infects this land. We must be smart with our response and employ multidimensional analyses of situations. Our response should never be to provoke those we disagree with or say that their beliefs are inferior to ours. Our response to Civil War statues and landmarks should not be one of anger but one of grief. The injustices of the past and present must weigh heavy on our hearts. Our past happened, the soldiers immortalized in statues lived. We cannot ignore what has happened. We must seek to be resilient and respond with love, not provoking violence. We must be able to come to terms with our history and how this is reflected in our current environment. Reconciliation will never come from anger and hatred. Reconciliation will rise from resilience.
