Silent Sam: Craig Speech

The damnable Carr speech gets all the attention--understandably. But Governor Locke Craig also spoke at the dedication. One part of his address:

Ours is the task to build a State worthy of all patriotism and heroic deeds, a State that demands justice for herself and all her people, a State sounding with the music of victorious industry, a State whose awakened conscience shall lead the State to evolve from the forces of progress a new social order, with finer development for all conditions and classes of our people

Whatever happens with Sam, and whatever horrific, loathsome bullshit Carr said (and, apparently, did), this won't go away. The ideas of the Union, and of Craig, won out. The arc of the moral universe has, in these important respects, bent toward justice. 

   Questions about Silent Sam are fine-tuning questions. They may still be important--but they're more like rearranging the table and chair on the Missouri. The cause is won, if incompletely implemented. The questions at hand are questions about symbolism and offence. I continue to think that neither I--a white dude--nor the PC outrage mob are good judges of such a matter. The most telling question is: how does the reasonable black North Carolinian in the street interpret Silent Sam? 

   Crucial and complex advice for both sides:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.