To further expand on one of my points about Charlottesville, I believe all Confederate monuments should be torn down.  Not the war memorials to dead soldiers, but specifically statues of Confederate generals and commanders. 

These statues should've never been put up in the first place.  Many of them were erected in the early 20th century, decades after the Civil War ended.  Many more were erected during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s.  Historians have suggested this was to promote Jim Crow laws, enforce racial segregation, and promote white supremacy.  I heard an interview of a black southern citizen who said something along the lines of, "When you walked by the confederate monument in the center of town, you knew who was in charge." 

The Confederacy lost the Civil War.  I could be wrong, but it's probably uncommon to revere a general who lost the war.  A Confederate statue is a participation trophy for showing up to the Civil War.  Oddly enough, the political party that wants to keep these statues is the same party that's outspoken in their criticism of "special snowflakes" and our "everyone gets a trophy" society. 

Not only did the Confederacy lose, but I believe they were guilty of treason or some other crime against the country.  There's a special kind of hatred reserved for people who want to destroy a union.  It's like cancer.  You can't just hate it like a virus that grows inside you; it's literally a part of you.  We don't make monuments to cancer.  A country shouldn't make monuments to people or causes that literally fought against their own country. 

I think it's fairly widely agreed-upon that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of history.  They held views that we no longer find acceptable.  Sort of like Hitler.  Germany, as far as I know, doesn't have statues of Hitler.  If you fought for the losing side, whether or not you held those values, you don't deserve to be memorialized. 

Finally, there's the topic of erasing history, which is seriously a stupid argument.  Do people honestly think we'll forget about the Civil War, and who the generals were, and what battles were fought, and what the reasons were for fighting, and who won?  The history is already recorded, in books and movies and museums and our collective consciousness.  Move the statues to museums.  Keep the memorials of fallen soldiers.  This isn't complicated. #politics