Mondays with Mike: Settle in for some good reads

When I moved to the D.C. area in the late 1970s, I was flabbergasted to routinely run across vestiges and glorifications of various Civil War figures. I mean, a guy from the Land of Lincoln can be uncomfortable driving on Jefferson Davis Highway. That’s when my naïveté about what the Civil War had accomplished—and how far we had come—began to crumble.

There are still people who will argue that the monuments are about history, blah, blah. And you may have found yourself on the fence about Confederate monuments out of a vague sense of wanting to be fair or nice or wanting to pick your fights.

Read this piece, Southern Comfort, and then we can talk again. Note: It’s from the NY Review of Books, and it was written in 2001. And it’s as timely today as ever. (H/T The Beachwood Reporter.) It isn’t short—but it’s well written, well researched, and well reasoned. So I hope you’ll settle in and give it a read.

Speaking of the unreconciled aftermath of the Civil War, here’s another piece I ran across at Christianity Today about how one, as a Christian American, should confront the awful history of lynching and moreover, the terror tactics to enforce white supremacy during Jim Crow. It, too, requires an investment in time that I found worthwhile.

Bryan Stephenson managed not to get shot by the police.

There’s also this piece that begins with a terrifying first-person account of nearly being shot by the police–Presumption of Guilt was written by Bryan Stephenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. He builds on his harrowing personal experience and writes about the complexity of the forces that came together to put him in that spot. It isn’t preachy—no matter how you think about these matters, I think you’ll learn something. Give it a read.

Finally, I’ve mentioned Roger Wallenstein’s weekly White Sox Report at the Beachwood Reporter. This week’s column isn’t about baseball. Roger is Jewish, and he reflects on feeling something different and unwelcome about being Jewish, something he’d never felt in his 70+ years until watching what happened in Charlottesville. It’s called The Plot Against America – And Me.

In the aftermath of Charlottesville—and in response to this sense of being in a constant state of national emergency the last several months—I get caught up in the pithy social media memes, and the echo chamber that I and like-minded people can get caught up in. I get enraged, feel self-righteous, and then return to sort of an empty and pessimistic state.

And then I bump into people—like the people who wrote these articles—who are wrestling with things the way a lot of us are. They give me comfort in knowing I’m not alone, in reminding me that memes are not knowledge or reasoned arguments, and that it’s incumbent on all of us to start at the start: Read. Think hard about what you really believe—and be honest about it. And then express it, respectfully, even if it takes more than 140 characters.