Robert E. Lee would say his marker is a huge waste | Comment

Culture Warriors are suing Charleston County Schools (again) over a long-gone Robert E. Lee Highway sign.

They say the Charleston County School District and city are “desecrating” history — and violating the South Carolina Heritage Act — by refusing to return the granite sign to its rightful place in front of the school on Upper King Street.

Where few people noticed it in the first place.

Like everything else these days, it’s a repeat. You see, the American Heritage Association lost this fight in court two years ago when it couldn’t even get our culture war-friendly attorney general to help.

Talk about a lost cause.

But some people love nothing better than fighting losing battles, especially here. And this group is buoyed by our recent troubles, confident that the world has once again become the opposite of woke.

“With the support of the newly elected Presidential Administration, it is time for SC Republican leadership to live up to its responsibilities and uphold state law by restoring illegally removed monuments in Charleston,” Jim Lechner, vice president of the American Heritage Association, said in a Nov. 14 statement, as reported. Adam Parker and Valerie Nava of The Post and Courier.

Snore.

There’s so much to unpack here. First of all, and I say this with no small amount of envy, some people simply have nothing better to do.

Secondly, and this is a bigger problem today, people need to stop worshiping public figures (especially politicians). Even Lee didn’t want a bunch of statues of him in the countryside because he knew what it would lead to.

“I think it is wiser … not to keep open the wounds of war, but to follow the example of those peoples who sought to erase the traces of civil strife, to consign to oblivion the feelings generated,” the old general wrote in response to plans for a post-war memorial at Gettysburg.

As usual, Bobby Lee – one of the less problematic nicknames (for the 21st century) that the soldiers gave him – was right.