When I was a boy, my parents decided to take a trip to the Big Easy (New Orleans) for a week’s vacation. I was only seven or eight, so I don’t remember much of the specifics, but a couple of incidents still stand out in what is left of my memory.

We were on the obligatory Grey Line bus tour of NOLA’s sights, one of which was a statue of Robert E. Lee perched on a tall column. The tour guide was waxing eloquent about the virtues of Marse Robert, the ultimate personification of the Virginia cavalier, etc., etc., when a querulous voice, with a distinct northeastern twang, inquired, “And how do you suppose General Lee got to top of that column?” The perplexed tour guide looked at the elderly lady posing the question, momentarily at a loss for words. And then she supplied the answer: “Ulysses S. Grant chased him up there!”

So much for all of the guns falling silent after Appomattox.

At the time there were few, if any, interstate highways sweeping majestically across the landscape. To go from A to B, you used two-lane roads that meandered through whistle-stop towns and towns too small to have whistles. When nature called, you made a quick stop at the nearest gas station. Being in the South, the facilities were clearly marked “white” and “colored.” The importance of the distinction was lost on my dad, only recently arrived in the USA. Ever practical, if you had to go, you had to go. If the white’s only bathroom was occupied, and the colored bathroom was open …

When Dad came out, I don’t know who was more horrified, the white good-old-boy gas station attendant or the black gentleman who was waiting to use the segregated facility next.

Somehow, we were able to skedaddle out of that particular town without reigniting a second round of the War Between the States, or, as the locals tended to call it, “The War of Northern Aggression.”

The point is, here we are, more than 60 years on, and what are we talking about? Confederate monuments, and race relations.

Really? Still?

Of all the justifications coming out of Charlottesville for preserving the statues of individuals bent on destroying the United States, the one that comes the closest to being defensible is that they represent and honor Southern heritage.

Heck, I get that.  My “hole in the water into which I pour money” is named after a battle that reestablished Scottish independence. That battle, the Battle of Bannockburn, took place in 1314.

I’m still a bit miffed about the Act of Union of 1707 whereby Scotland lost its independent parliament and became a junior partner in something called “Great Britain.”

Scots never forget.

I understand the importance of heritage.

I can understand a desire to honor the bravery and sacrifice of those ordinary soldiers who wore the butternut gray.

However, it is something else entirely to honor the cause for which they fought.

The most sanitary explanation of the war is that it was caused by disagreement over states’ rights vis a vis the national government – a disagreement that still resonates today. But the major “state right” being asserted was the right to preserve the existing social order, which in turn, was built upon the “peculiar institution” of slavery.

Slavery is the original sin of this nation. For all the good they did otherwise, the framers of the Constitution simply kicked this festering sore down the road, many hoping that it would collapse of its own accord.

It didn’t.

The primary purpose of the statues in question, all erected decades after the guns fell silent, was not to honor the war dead, but to pay homage to a romantic notion of “The Lost Cause.”

At its heart, what was the Lost Cause? It was an attempt to restore, by other means, the southern social order antebellum – the pre-Civil War South of which racial inequality and bigotry was part and parcel.

It is not by chance that more than 400 of these monuments were erected in the era shortly after the Supreme Court, in the 1896 Plessey vs. Ferguson decision, approved state racial segregation laws for public facilities so long as the facilities were “separate but equal,’ which, in practice, they rarely were.

More than 90 more were erected in the late ’50s and early ’60s during the height of the civil rights movement.

A cause that was rotten at its core at its inception does not improve over time. It should remain lost.

And, because they seek to perpetuate that cause, these monuments’ time has passed.

Honor the war dead, their widows, and their orphans in their final resting places.

But consign to the trash heap of history the cause that led to their demise.

Where it belongs.