How Freedom Dies

This is a generic photo from the internet and does not depict my family.

One night in the 1920's, a group of Ku Klux Klansmen on horseback, draped in sheets and carrying shotguns and horsewhips, showed up at the sharecropper shack where my maternal grandfather and grandmother were living in rural Sequoyah County near Redland.

They had come for my grandfather.  He was a socialist political agitator.  It was also alleged that he was a neer do well that wasn't taking proper care of his family.  Family history indicates that there may have been some truth to that.  The Klan had come to teach him the error of his ways with a  horsewhip.

Instead of standing and facing them like my grandmother, my grandfather took off through the cotton fields half dressed and didn't come back for years leaving a wife and three children literally broke and with a crop in the field.  The infant child was my mother.

My maternal grandfather headed east and didn't stop for over a thousand miles.  The last some family members saw of him, he was wild eyed, still half dressed and covered with scratches and cuts from his headlong flight through the cotton patches and brambles.

I likely had relatives on both sides of this sad event.  So, you might say that I have inherited the right to speak for my family on this issue.

This week, someone posted a picture of the local Klan in nearby town on a regional cultural and historical social media group that I subscribe to.  Almost immediately, some precious little liberal, millennial thinking,  politically correct snowflake demanded that it be taken down.  And sure enough, soon it disappeared.

Harvard professor and philosopher George Santyana taught us that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.  Future generations owe their ancestors who suffered through the effects of evil the courtesy of at least remembering it.  Remembering it honors the victims and serves as a stark reminder to all us in this fallen world that evil is always waiting to reappear.

Book burning, statute smashing, historical revisionism and planned ignorance come in many forms in the age of the internet.  The most common form these days is the "offended" liberal who demands censorship to prevent dissemination of  facts, thoughts and ideas they find uncomfortable or inconvenient.  Book burning is evil.  Suppression of historical fact is evil.  Suppression of free expression is evil.  And giving in to it is evil.  Just as evil as the evil it purports to suppress.

It never ends well.