Retroactive Blame

As we age, so does society. we learn as we all do. In the 1980's racial stereotypes abounded. Before that our leading singer was Al Jolson who sang what was then known as Negro Spirituals. He did it in black face. It wasn't to mock the black race, but black people were not allowed to perform so those like Jolson, who admired spirituals, who wore black face to honor that music.

This and other practices were socially acceptable then, but not now. Our society has grown and learned about equality. Thirty to fifty years later, young people without a sense of history are tearing down historical monuments to the civil war and suddenly examining these behaviors through 21st century eyes, discounting the intervening years, reexamining behavior long in the past with today's standards. This is dead wrong. Just as society has grown, so have individuals.

People like Virginia's governor and many others are having to deal with behavior from many years go when it was permissible. It is time to ditch retroactive blame and salute those that have grown past the socially ignorant years, not acting like leftist Nazis living in the past.

Leave history alone. The civil war happened and though many of our young people haven't a clue as to the real causes of rural vs.industrial areas of our country and the friction it caused. We now live in a much more enlightened age. Celebrate that rather than denigrate those that lived before you were born.