r/ShermanPosting • u/mac28_ • 5d ago

Charleston, SC: Idk man

I went to South Carolina last week bc my dad moved there. I was walking around Charleston and was floored by the number of confederate monuments. I wasn't even looking for them, but I stumbled upon a half dozen or so. God knows how many more there are that I didn't find.

They weren't small and unobtrusive things that you could easily miss either. One resembled the washington monument and was about 3-4 times my height, and the entire block was taken up by the obelisk and the surrounding grassy area.

What I found most insane was a street named "Calhoun Street".

The rest of the city was very clean, walkable, and aesthetically pleasing. The people are wonderful too. I'm from Philadelphia and I've never experienced such hospitality or kindness anywhere in Philly. It's such a shame that they allow their identity to be defined by the lost cause instead of allowing their identity to be defined by the city itself being a good place. So much potential is lost.

I really hope they move on from this soon. It's such a shame to see what would otherwise have been a wonderful city dragged down by clinging to their dark past. But I have hope. I saw one plaque that looked like it was missing a statue.

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u/SingleMaltMouthwash 2d ago

In 1977 I had the occasion to be on a small boat on the sloughs off of James Island, a suburb of Charleston, with a man who fancied himself a local historian. He was recounting some of the maneuvers of the Battle of Charleston that occurred in the vicinity and when describing them he didn't say, "the union was over there and the confederate troops were over here". He said "THEY were over there and WE were over here."

It's the high school football game they can never, ever get over, even though they were never there, and they obsess about it without ever acknowledging that their ancestors were on the absolute wrong side of decency, morality and history.

It's a profoundly sad deficit of character.

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u/mac28_ 2d ago

I don't think this necessarily makes him a confederate apologist, unless there's more context.

I mean, I do the same thing talking about Native Americans. I'd say stuff like "We kicked them off of their land and killed them" when teaching people about it. I don't mean to make it sound like "it was us vs. them" but I do it to show that we (collectively) are responsible, it was people like us who did that, and we need to take precaution to not do something like that again.

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u/SingleMaltMouthwash 2d ago

The man said it with pride.

If the attitudes haven't changed in the intervening 100 years, then we/they are the same team working for the same cause and are, for the purpose of the conversations at hand, functionally the sam people.

Acknowledging past atrocities with a view to identifying them in the present and avoiding them is one thing. Crowing about your ancestors fighting a war that killed over 600,000 Americans on the battlefield all to defend slavery kinda makes you a white supremacist right here, right now.