Just as I wonder how much more whole the nation might have become had President Lincoln had those four more years in the White House to "bind up the nation's wounds," so also do I wonder how much more of the bitterness that continued over the generations to poison this country might have been avoided had Robert E. Lee survived to a riper age, and thus been able to provide longer --as an antidote to that toxin-- that spirit of reconciliation that Lee was so determined to promote.
OF HEROES AND EMULATION
Robert E. Lee remains, as far as I can tell, the paramount hero of the whites of the American South. But how far from Lee --with his integrity, his kindness, his unwavering adherence to the principles he advocated-- are the people whom most Southern whites have followed in our time!
What would Lee have thought of a pompous and hypocritical windbag like Rush Limbaugh, or of a posturing liar and fraud like George W. Bush? It is easily imagined.
What is less easily grasped is how it is that a culture can stray so far from the path that its heroes represent. It is not just Robert E. Lee, of course, whom today's Southern whites have both idolized and completely betrayed. Even more fundamentally there's Jesus. What could be more un-Christ-like than the way of the Bushite presidency that these white Southerners--who regard themselves as devoutly and intensely Christian--have followed and supported?
There's nothing unique about the white South in straying from the spirit of the heroes to whom it declares such allegiance. Perhaps all cultures are prone to fall into such a gap. One might wonder, however, if some cultures are more liable than others to such unconscious hypocrisy and such betrayal of their heroes.
Yet, in any event, there stands Robert E. Lee, his name on schools and highways across the south, his bronzed image sitting on horseback in parks and public squares around the region. Perhaps the way forward in America could include a renewal in the South of the study of this great man. If he's a hero not just because he won battles against a resented enemy, but also because he embodied truly fine traditional and conservative virtues of what a human being, and particularly a Southern gentleman, should be, then perhaps the study of this man's example in life could help even at this late date to bring more kindness and more harmony to our nation, once again trying to emerge out of an intensely troubled time.
Perhaps the white people of this region --the region to which the Republican Party has largely now been forced to retreat-- could wear the mental equivalent of a bracelet with WWRELD on it: What Would Robert E. Lee Do?
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
