One Civil War was enough — don’t risk another to erase history

Imagine a time in the not-so-distant future where all the fragile souls out there have succeeded in wiping clean any trace of our country’s history and replaced it with a more fictitious version — a version they get to rewrite.

All offensive monuments have been removed (the ones that haven’t already been destroyed or defaced), the history books have been burned (in the schools that still actually have history books), and the granite faces of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln have all been blasted off of Mount Rushmore.

Recall this eerily haunting passage from George Orwell’s “1984,” written almost 70 years ago, about a fictitious future dictatorship:

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

People may roll their eyes and think this is just the hot topic of the moment, but what we’re seeing today has the potential to spiral into a complete Big Brother-like takeover of what we’re allowed to think, remember, and know about the country we call home.  

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Where exactly will the new version of “history” begin and what will it look like for the next generation?

{mosads}Will “history” start with Barack Obama and the election of the first African-American president, forgetting the real history of everything our country went through to actually get to the point where we had the freedom to elect an African American as president? Or will we be permitted to go back as far as William Jefferson (scratch that, can’t say Jefferson anymore) Clinton and learn about how he, in his own way, christened the Oval Office?

In the state of Virginia, where my children go to school, fourth grade is a huge year for learning about history. Practically in our backyard are the homes of George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, Thomas Jefferson, as well as Jamestown and Colonial Williamsburg, just to name a few. All these people and places have connections to slavery, and all of them have played a major role in making our country what it is today.

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Do we just take a bulldozer to Mount Vernon and Monticello and the rest of their homes? Do we level off Jamestown and Williamsburg and build some more wineries along the Colonial Wine Trail?

The Fairfax County school board, in all it’s political correctness, recently voted to change the name of J.E.B Stuart High School in Falls Church, Va., at a cost of nearly $1 million because it’s named after a Confederate general. This was the priority of a county that has a nearly $50 million budget deficit and underpaid teachers.

There are now calls to remove Confederate statues in the U.S. Capitol. One member of Congress calling for their removal is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Yet her father seemed to disagree, as he dedicated a statue of General Robert E. Lee when he was mayor of Baltimore.

“Today, with our nation beset by subversive groups and propaganda which seeks to destroy our national unity, we can look for inspiration to the lives of Lee and (Stonewall) Jackson to remind us to be resolute and determined in preserving our sacred institutions,” he said at the time.

Now, those Baltimore statues are removed.

In the case of Pelosi’s father, those statues were erected in the 1940s but many monuments are much older. Why, all of a sudden are we worried about statues that have been around for a century or more?

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We’re so busy protesting everything that hurts our fragile little feelings that, meanwhile, North Korea is shooting missiles over Japan and threatening the U.S., people are crossing our borders who want to kill us and hardworking families are unable to afford their ever increasing health care premiums. And yet some of us can’t walk past a statue without coming completely unhinged.

In the case of these members of Congress, the irony is they want to erase from history the very people who worked to give them the power they enjoy today. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were truly flawed and complicated men, but without them there would be no American revolution, no Declaration of Independence and no Constitution.

Just in case there’s still any doubt that people have completely lost their minds, there’s a Change.org petition to replace Confederate monuments in New Orleans with a statue of Britney Spears. And in Baltimore, the city is building a monument to a drag queen famous for eating dog feces.

Yes, that’s a thing.

As I write this, people in the great state of Texas are suffering, really suffering, in the wake of Tropical Storm Harvey. Right in the midst of their tragedy, protesters have staged a 10-day civil disobedience march from Charlottesville, Va., to Washington, D.C., to draw attention to themselves in the name of fighting white supremacy and calling for the removal of President Trump.

Because, of course they have to blame President Trump. The Russia hoax didn’t stick — there was no “there” there, so now they have to come up with another reason he’s unfit to be president. Today, with the help of the media, they’re attempting to brand him a racist. When that doesn’t work, in another few weeks they’ll try something else.

These marchers are so passionate about their cause, which started with 200 people, that after just one day the majority of them couldn’t hack a little bit of rain, and their army of 200 shrunk to 35.

Why are extremist groups trying to start another Civil War? Wasn’t the first one enough?

Lauren DeBellis Appell was deputy press secretary for Sen. Rick Santorum’s (R-Pa.) successful 2000 re-election campaign, as well as assistant communications director for the Senate Republican Policy Committee (2001-2003)

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