The social insanity just keeps tearing across America, even with Trump in the White House.  Many of us in the outback have escaped the worst of it but have grown weary of everything being about race and evil whites.  The ghastly murder of Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte underlines how nuts things have become.  It took place in August, but we only recently even heard of it.

I think this girl’s murder had more to do with racial animus than insanity, like so many other racial incidents the last decade.  Trayvon Martin couldn’t settle for just beating up George Zimmerman; no, he had to try to kill him.  And Michael Brown.  And the next one, and the next.  But the grisly murder of Iryna Zarutska had no trigger to flip on the hatred switch in her killer.  Nobody ordering him to the ground, or hands behind his back, or any of that.  Nothing but racial animus, developed his whole life by encouragement to hate whites.

An amazing thing about the reaction to this savagery was how it got drowned out in the noise about Pete Hegseth’s “Reconciliation Monument” in Arlington.  The Hate-America crowd alleged that the statue celebrates slavery.  Utter nonsense.  Although slavery was central to the Old South economy, it was held in place by plantation elites, not by Jim and Jennifer Oldsouth, working their small acreage to eke out a subsistence living.

Slavery is not what Southerners celebrate.  Southerners celebrate the culture, quite apart from slavery, where ladies were treated with respect; society was generally civil; people were friendly and helpful; and, in Rhett Butler’s words, life had “a slow charm.”  Even today you find this friendliness in the Old South.

When we celebrate America, we are not celebrating the wrongs done along the way.  We are celebrating that America historically has made a sincere effort to do better than what went before.  American history needs no apology.  Before America (prodded by the Brits), nobody anywhere, ever, had even questioned the rectitude of slavery.

To my way of thinking, we need less reconciliation and more blunt truth.  Thirty years ago, WaPo reporter Keith Richburg authored the hugely important Out of America (mentioned by Andrea Widburg a while back), which passed largely unnoticed.  He had just spent a tour in Africa as a foreign correspondent, arriving as a starry-eyed believer that whites had caused all Africa’s problems.

Three years later, he left, disabused of that notion.  Africa’s a mess because Africans make it a mess.  He was sick in his soul of the stifling tribalism, the endless killing, the eternal corruption, the omnipresent lying.  He left Africa grateful that an anonymous ancestor had survived to pass on the genes that would become Keith Richburg, American.

Don’t apologize for America.  Stand up for her.  Perhaps with a Glock securely at your hip.

Image: JSMed via Pixabay, Pixabay License.