Living Monuments

Consider this: In order for you to have been born, even if we only go back 12 generations (an arbitrary cut-off), it required 4,094 people: parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, and so forth and so on. There are legions of people with legions of stories of love, joy, pain, deprivation, passion, sorrows, triumph, and tragedy—in short, real lives of real people whose real actions, brought about your very existence.


That we are here at all is a miracle.

That we are descended from Confederate soldiers in this march of the generations, along with those who came before and those that came after, provides us with a rare insight into our place in the historical drama played out during our sojourn in the Americas.

We are not rootless people. We may not be able to easily go back 12 generations, but we can understand that one’s identity—even if someone picks up another to replace it, which is mere self-deceit—is determined by our forefathers (and mothers) and the choices that they made for the sake of their children and their children’s children, as their own father’s and mother’s had done before them. Reflecting on this reality gives us a sense of being someone from somewhere—more than a mere individual sloshing about in a sea of other individuals. We came from somewhere and are keenly aware of it—unlike the rootless, present-tense, modern man who has been robbed of his identity and seems to be proud of it!

It is because he has no identity, no context, no people, that modern man is easily swayed by every strange doctrine or ideology that seems to give his life some kind of purpose. Among these purposes over the last 150+ years has been for the rootless man to make us like him. Equally miserable, equally lost, equally fettered to the foolish notion that it is the individual acting out his “own truth,” free from the forces of history. This poor soul, bless him, cannot understand why we will not give up the “tyranny of history” and “bitterly cling” to the traditions, folk-ways, religion, manners, values, principles, and so forth, of the past. Things that make us a recognisable people, all those things that make each of us somebody, from somewhere, with a story to tell—the story of his people.

We, on the other hand, know that the truth of history—who we are and where we came from—liberates us and does not bind. We are a people with a shared history and we are not interested in any of their new ideas that have brought about this clownish world where everyone makes-up their own identity, freeing themselves from the evils of the past by throwing their people under the proverbial bus.

We Southerners are not having it, but have, nevertheless been overwhelmed by the seemingly endless attacks on our patrimony. This began with flags and plaques honouring the bravery and sacrifice of our Confederate fathers, then moving their sights to monuments, and even disinterring the dead. What kind of barbarians are we dealing with?

Our duty to defend the good name of the Confederate soldier, vindicate the cause for which they fought, and to make sure that the true history of the South is transmitted to future generations is not the same thing as winning lawsuits and opposing the removal of flags, monuments, etc. It is bigger than that. In fact, I am quite confident that our ancestors did not erect those monuments so that we would have to spend our time and resources begging courts to not remove the memorials to our valiant dead. They would not have scraped and bowed before the Yankee empire and their enablers at every level of government. They did not confuse the symbol for the thing symbolized. They erected these monuments so that their generation would not be forgotten. To remind us of who we are and where we came from; to remind us of those that gave their all for us so we—their offspring—would not have to live under the boot of an all-powerful “federal” government that through arms and then through their courts (and perhaps at some later date by arms again) make heroes into villains and villains into saints.


While we may not be able to accomplish much in the arena of politics to stop the destruction of our monuments in many, far too many cases, we can still do much to fulfill the charge by becoming living monuments. Living reminders of our Confederate ancestors, what they stood for, and what we stand for today as their sons.

While our fathers did their best to reconcile with the new indivisible nation (not the federated union of their fathers), and be “good, patriotic Americans,” it was not enough to satisfy their desire for our ultimate annihilation. No matter how much Southern blood was shed and will be shed in their endless wars of conquest and occupation, they felt it proper to rename military bases that once honoured our fathers. In the name of reconciliation with people who know little about themselves and even less about us, they thought it proper, indeed a moral act, to remove the reconciliation monument from Arlington cemetery—the largest military cemetery in America and conveniently established, as you know, on the stolen property of Mr. & Mrs. Robert E. Lee.


If the former Confederate or Southern States are no longer welcomed, indeed, are so repulsive to the country that they have no qualms with removing a reconciliation monument which held the peace for generations, what are we?

I don’t know who they think we are, but I’m pretty damn sure that if they rename every road or school with Confederate links, take down every one of our fathers’ flags, remove every monument so lovingly erected by our women (primarily) in the poverty of the post-war South, and even dig-up every Confederate soldier so as to not “pollute” their military cemeteries, we will not have lost that which is most important, our Southern identity and deep, deep roots of our family tree, lovingly planted in the fertile soil of the South. This cannot be taken and will not be taken, except by our own consent. We can carry on their legacy of their love of liberty, fidelity to kith and kin, the value of one’s word, and our manners, to name only a few.

We can shoulder this, we must shoulder this, if we are to be a living monument—more numerous and effective than any carved in stone or cast in bronze—by taking back what was stolen and is being stolen from us now.

It is time to think outside of the box, utilize new methods of engagement, and take the moral high ground by living honourably and caring for those permanent things of value encapsulated in our monuments, flags, and memorials. Then and only then will we occupy the moral high ground and position ourselves for victory.

​We ought to continue to erect our own monuments and raise our own flags, but imagine the effect of tens of thousands of living monuments rising up from their couches, their TVs and especially their smartphones and begin living like the men we can and must be—openly, honestly, and unashamed.