The Slippery Slope

I made a comment on Facebook a while back and got some comments that showed people didn’t understand where I was coming from. That topic concerned the removal of Confederate monuments.

First, understand that I was born in the North and lived in the north off and on for a good portion of my early life. Then I moved south to the DC area, Kentucky and finally Georgia. I am no more partial to the South as I am to the North, both having been a part of my life.

I have visited battlefields in the North and South but am not an expert in skirmishes or battles and know little about the reasons of each.

Yet, I still feel that the removal of monuments to participants of the North or South is wrong. Let me explain why.

Decades ago when the Internet was young, I used to run a computer bulletin board system from my house. That system allowed people to send and receive electronic mail (email) and to participate in forums. Those emails and forums were copied worldwide by myself and other BBS owners. As you can imagine, there were times that we might see a message that we might disagree with, or was a major issue brewing. Some BBS owners began to monitor the forums that they hosted and began removing messages that they found offensive. They censored messages.

You might agree that if you are carrying a forum and people post things that you don’t agree with, then you have the right to remove them. That becomes a problem. If that forum is carried on hundreds of systems and each owner of that system deletes messages they find offensive, there might be nothing left in the forums.

Even if you find fault with the above, keep in mind what we owners soon found out. If we started deleting messages, we were moderating the forum. That meant we were reading messages, evaluating them and taking action. That also meant that we were now responsible for the content of the forum and could be taken to task for content of anything left.

Another example. My Mother was in an apartment building with other elderly people. They had a system in the lobby whereby each apartment resident, when they checked their mail each day, would flip an indicator over, showing that they had been active that day (active meaning they were alive). If a person was not able to get downstairs, but a neighbor had contacted them that day, the neighbor would flip the tag. If a tag was not flipped, the front desk could see and send someone to check on that persons welfare. That all came crashing down when it was decided that by having the board in the first place, the front office staff, and the apartment owner, were now responsible for checking on peoples welfare, rather than just offering a helpful way for neighbors to check on neighbors. The board came down.

Good intentions often create a slippery slope.

The issue of removing statues comes to mind. Someone or some group decided to have monuments or statues removed because they don’t like what it stands for. In this case, Confederate statues. Then you begin to think, OK so what does that encompass? Just Confederates? Slave Owners? People who supported slaves? If the slaves were brought over in U.S. ships, what about boycotting companies related to the owners? What about Africans who sold their own people into slavery and sent them away? What about the old Southern Democrats who create the KKK? What about the streets named after Robert E. Lee? What about high schools and roads named after these people. What about parks?

A sportscaster with the last name of Lee was pulled from a broadcast because of his last name to ease potential problems. That he was Chinese didn’t come into play.

Fort Bragg is named after the Confederate General.

What about all these places? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._counties_named_after_prominent_Confederate_historical_figures

See how the slippery slope starts?

Some things start out with good in intentions but can quickly become mired in issues.

The $15 minimum wage comes to mind. To help people have money to live on, the suggestion has been made to raise the minimum wage. All that does is add to inflation, but people ignore that fact. It would serve the same goal to find ways to reduce costs rather than increase wages. If everyone making less than $15 an hour magically made $15 a hour, what happens to the people performing harder or more technical jobs who were currently making $15 an hour? They are going to want more money because they are doing more and deserve more. So the whole pay scale gets pushed up. Many of the companies employing these people will charge more for their goods (to make the same profit) and that adds to inflation. Yes, there are some cases where towns have raised pay rates without this happening, but I say to wait!

Once they burned books because people felt they were evil or sexual or whatever. The idea was that if there was no book about the subject, it would go away.

Trying to hide something because you don’t agree, does not make the discussion go away. Sometimes it makes it more in the forefront.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

If you are a schoolteacher, you might place a list of commonly misspelled words on the wall as a reminder to the students.

The Ten Commandments are a reminder of all the things the church wants ou to think about.

While some may consider Confederate monuments as wrong, they ARE a reminder of a troubling time in our past and a war not to be forgotten.