History moves forward. It's progressive. When it attempts to step backwards, the rest of the world reacts. This is especially true when it comes to civil rights, to lessons learned from the challenge of civil wars and revolution. It's all about protecting humanism and never trashing it.

I grew up in and around Charlottesville. The place means a great deal to me. So do the lessons I learned as a history student in elementary and high school, in college and graduate work.

I also lived for years of my childhood in post-World War II Europe, when the wounds of that cataclysm were still only two decades old, and still smoldering.

I learned that you do not coddle fascism, and especially Nazism. You don't allow its symbols to infiltrate the common forum; you do not glorify its defeated generals and civilian leaders.

I also learned, albeit over time, that the history I learned about the "War of Northern Aggression" and the role slavery played in southern history, were biased and wrong. The Virginia state history that I was taught was written in the 20th century to downplay the hard truths won in the harsh war we fought to allow the United States to join other world powers who eschewed the evils of human slavery. It was written to counter the forced integration it took us hundreds of years to achieve, allowing all our citizens equal opportunity, equal treatment. Not only under our laws, but in the ways we live our lives.

I remember colored entrances, drinking fountains, schools. I recall fights in the schools I attended where new black students were beaten while white students refused to attend middle schools created from former "central" schools that had been segregated.

And I have also learned, over the years, how hard our nation's women fought for the right to vote, to work and earn as much as their male counterparts. How all our citizens keep pushing for the same rights as everyone else, even though many still see their calls for equality as an affront.

I'm embarrassed by our president. I think he is flat-out wrong. I think that those who support his moral equivalency tweets and ramblings are acting against what this nation is and has been about. And that these are issues that need reiterating by everyone... or we face undoing all that we spent 241 years building, strengthening, and fighting to retain.

The military has turned against him for insinuating that what the Confederacy stood for was anything but traitorous to what the United States has become, or that the bigotry of Nazism has any place in who we are as a people of many peoples, of open arms and ideas. His own party is turning against him for suggesting that those who fight against un-American ideas and ideals are wrong when they feel threatened into moving beyond classic nonviolent protest to quell attacks on American ideals, and even American flags, with others' repugnant standards.

There are battles we don't fight again, or rights we rescind. If there are many who support white supremacy and other far right ideologies, so be it. But they will have to expect a major fight as they espouse their beliefs, because they run against who we are. End of story.

Keep Confederate statues? Not in public spaces where they have come to symbolize attacks on any segment of our citizenry. Not if you want to remain part of the great American experiment in an open Democracy, a worldly Republic based on a moral as well as political revolution.

How perfect that this all comes forward just as we are about to experience our first total eclipse since 1918, when women were first getting the vote across the nation, and a half century before the killing of civil rights activists and their kids, and then the assassination of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy, helped move us all forward towards greater freedoms, instead of a retrenchment some wanted instead of progress.

Maybe we can move beyond the breach, again. And at last.

Maybe we can all finally get beyond this man, and all he's ennobled, who is sucking all the oxygen out of the room and keeping us from tackling real issues we all need the power to finally face together.

— Paul Smart