By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – America’s greatest writer said it best.

“The past is never dead,” the great Mississippi-born novelist William Faulkner wrote. “It isn’t even past.”

We Americans now are having a painful national discussion about our history. We are face to face, once again, with the reality that the past is every bit as fundamental to this country’s life as the air we breathe and the ground upon which we walk.

This is particularly true of our great national catastrophe, the Civil War, which remains the bloodiest such conflict in human history.

It is a cliché to say that the Civil War never ended.

Clichés, though, often become clichés because they have truth to them.

The last shots in the declared Civil War may have been fired more than 150 years ago, but the fighting continued long after that.

Reconstruction.

Jim Crow.

Separate but equal.

Lynching.

Poll taxes.

Bus boycotts.

Sit-ins.

Freedom Rides.

Black Lives Matter.

We Americans struggle to come to terms with this history because this part of our past is not flattering. We are a nation founded on a shared, seeming proposition – that all human beings have an equal right to freedom and the pursuit of happiness – but we have betrayed that core conviction.

Again.

And again.

And again.

We argue now about the Confederate flag, Confederate monuments, and Confederate memorials.

NASCAR has dispensed with displaying the Confederate flag. Confederate monuments in Indianapolis and elsewhere have come down – some by official act and others because activists have torn them down.

A vigorous debate rages about whether military installations – Fort Bragg, etc. – should continue to be named after Confederate generals. The president of the United States says yes. Increasingly, though, the nation’s military leaders, senators, and representatives say no.

This is not an argument empty of meaning.

The dwindling band of the flag’s defenders says it is a symbol of the courage with which Confederate soldiers fought. That is worthy of tribute, they say.

Perhaps the Confederate troops fought bravely, but they did so in the service of the rankest and worst of causes. They styled themselves as sentinels of liberty, but the reason they made war on their own nation was to preserve the “right” to own and oppress other human beings.

It is important not just to understand that but also to acknowledge it.

Sanitizing that history – denying the great wrong the Confederacy represented – gives fresh life to enduring evils.

The most pernicious of these, of course, deals with the question of race. It is no wonder that slavery has been called America’s original sin, the offense that has marked and afflicted us throughout our often-tortured history. The most savage conflicts we Americans have had with each other have come over the issue of pigment.

Until we in some way atone for this nation’s original sin – until we begin, to use Martin Luther King’s elegant phrase, to judge people by “the content of their character” and not the color of their skin – we never will honor and fulfill our country’s great promise.

This refusal to see the Confederacy for what it was also has cost us in other ways.

Slavery was a crime against humanity but taking up arms against the duly elected and established the U.S. government was a crime against the nation.

It was treason.

That it was committed by many men – including those who have been honored with statues and other relics – who took sacred oaths to defend this nation, its Constitution and its people only compound the offense.

This notion that traitors somehow could consider themselves and be considered by others as patriots linger to this day, in destructive ways. It contributes to the odd belief that we Americans are somehow separate from the government that we established and that draws its authority from us.

And it has given rise to the childish notion that we do not have to abide by any law or electoral outcome with which we do not agree.

All these tensions have endured for the life of this nation and afflicted Americans of our grandparents’ grandparents’ grandparents’ generation – and even before.

They likely will continue to do so until we see our history, clear-eyed, and without sentimentality.

Because Faulkner was right.

The past is never past.

It isn’t even past.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

The City-County Observer posted this article without bias, opinion, or editing.