Dan Rodricks: Are we on the way to being 'better than this'?

BALTIMORE -- Are we going to grow up and move on? Are we going to stop fighting the Civil War? Are we ever going to recognize that ethnic, racial and gender diversity is a plus for the country, fundamentally part of our DNA, not something to fear and demonize?

In the current election, will we reject any candidate who takes us backward, into the mud of bigotry?

Are we, to quote the late Rep. Elijah Cummings, going to be “better than this”?

The other day, in soft autumn sunlight, I walked through Wyman Park Dell to the Baltimore Museum of Art, right past the opening in the woods where Confederate generals once stood in revered glory.

I liked what I did not see there.

The generals were gone; they’ve been gone for seven years. Their absence gave me a small dose of hope against all the vulgar, racist words that came out of Madison Square Garden during Donald Trump’s weekend rally there.

Where the massive memorial to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee once stood there’s an empty platform. A sign declares the place Harriet Tubman Grove.

Tubman was the Maryland woman who, as an escaped slave in the 19th Century, guided many others to freedom.

Until just a few years ago, the grove named for Tubman honored two men who, given the chance, would have killed her or returned her to slavery.

Descendant sympathizers of the Southern cause in the Civil War installed the memorial to Jackson and Lee in 1948. That was three years after millions of American civilians and soldiers, engaged in a foreign war, had saved the world from Hitler and fascism.

During the dedication ceremony in Wyman Park Dell, the governor of Maryland called Jackson and Lee “great Americans” and the Confederate statue “symbolic of our unity of purpose,” when, of course, it symbolized just the opposite — a long, bloody rebellion that tore the country apart in an effort to keep Black people enslaved.

The Baltimore Sun praised the statue for the way it “raises the average of our public art and helps support our reputation as the Monumental City.”

But the Baltimore Afro-American, with a far more honest take, called Jackson and Lee “traitors” who fought to keep the evil of slavery. “Hitler killed Jews,” the Afro’s editorial said. “Lee and Jackson exploited colored people as animals and property.”

The statue stood in Wyman Park Dell for nearly 70 years. It was removed by order of then-Mayor Catherine Pugh in August 2017, just a few days after neo-Nazis and other white supremacists raised torches for the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. That rally turned violent; a counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was killed and 35 other people injured when one of the neo-Nazis drove his car into a crowd. Trump, in the eighth month of his presidency, defended the white supremacists, saying there were “some very fine people” among them.

In Baltimore, Pugh said the Lee-Jackson statue and other Confederate memorials were removed in the interest of public safety. But no one missed the greater point of the best order Pugh ever issued — that it was way past time for Americans to stop honoring those who tried to destroy the union and keep slavery.

Opponents of statue removal claimed we were erasing the nation’s history when, in fact, we were acknowledging it — slavery and the bitter division that led to the secession of 11 Southern states — and taking racists off their pedestals.

That was progress.

But, for all progress, symbolic and statutory, we’ve made throughout our history, we find ourselves at this fraught place: One of the major political parties has again nominated for president a man who demonizes immigrants, considers himself above the law and promises to punish his domestic opponents, his fellow Americans, possibly with the U.S. military.

I ask again: When are we going to move on from this?

We are one-quarter of the way into the 21st Century. The Civil War ended nearly 160 years ago, and we’re still fighting among ourselves, with one side bogged down in all kinds of ridiculous conspiracy theories, juvenile and vulgar name-calling, blatant racism and fear mongering, mostly about immigrants.

It strikes me, above all, as a waste of valuable time. The climate change clock continues to click, louder and louder, and there’s Trump talking about Haitians eating dogs, speaking of immigrants as if they were all violent criminals and the biggest problem facing the country. His view of America is dark by choice; he paints as grim a picture as possible — against all facts that show a healthy, rebounding economy and falling crime rates — as if he’s the only man who can save us.

And millions, according to polls, appear ready again to make him president.

Viewed rationally, the choice between Trump, a felon who constantly lies and says the country is going to hell, and Kamala Harris, a longtime public servant who speaks positively of the future and champions the middle class, could not be more stark. Whatever benefits there would be to another Trump presidency are offset, many times over, by a dark downside. If elected again, he promises to immediately fire the special counsel who charged him with multiple crimes, a pledge that, if carried out, would be tyrannical.

“We are better than this,” Elijah Cummings said many times, expressing a faith now facing its biggest test.

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