Your Capital Was, By Any Other Name, Our Capital

The news of the shooting deaths of five staff at the Capital in Annapolis on Thursday, June 28, in all likelihood brought back many memories to a dwindling number of active and retired journalists (of which I’m one) whose careers began in just such a small town daily or weekly newspaper. 

If you were lucky enough to be a small- to medium-market newspaper reporter, editor, photographer, an ad salesperson, or classifieds coordinator, or a back-of-the-building pressroom staffer—working with actual hot type, huge rolls of newsprint, and gallons of ink—you were part of a close-knit community not just within the walls of your offices, but within the boundaries of your publication’s distribution.

This was not only true of the full-time staff, but it was true of the crews who bundled the newspaper and heaved the bundles from the loading dock onto ancient, gear-grinding trucks that trundled around the town before dawn or before dinner, dropping off string-tied bales on the driveways of paperboys who then biked or walked their assigned routes, flinging the papers onto the lawns and porches (and roofs) of subscribers. From the receptionist at the front end, to the paper carrier across town, everyone who touched that journal before it was read over a morning cup of coffee or in an easy chair before dinner, was intimately involved with the heartbeat of their town. I know.

I was an eleven-year-old paper boy in Wilmington, Ohio, in 1960, and then a teen-aged “cub” reporter with the Northern Virginia Sun in ‘67-’68, moving away to college where I worked as a reporter and photographer for the Longmont Daily Times-Call, northeast of Boulder, Colorado, from 1968 to 1971. I remember my assigned beats for the Times-Call: the sugar beet crop and the Great Western Sugar processing plant; a huge turkey farm; the tiny towns of Frederick, Dacono, and Firestone with their quirky water-filtration systems and limited- or no ambulance services.

Breaking news stories were few and far between, but there was always something to keep our newsroom busy, and while we were small potatoes as far as the big-city papers down in Denver or back East were concerned, our readers depended on us to be a reflection of their daily lives in Small Town America. We were the chroniclers of their births, their struggles, their harvest successes, their courtroom dramas, their victories on the local football fields, their garden clubs, their Rotary meetings, their holidays, their 50th wedding anniversaries, and their departures noted in our obituaries.

We knocked out our stories on mechanical typewriters (imagine), using reams of cheap paper, and changing ribbons at least once a week. We huddled with the city editor and the managing editor who helped us shape our stories and cut them to fit whatever column inches were available, and we sighed whenever a story met an editor’s spike. Red pencils, blue pencils, layout sheets and waxed headlines, datelines and headlines, the rumble of the presses, the newsprint on our fingertips…the tactile, auditory, and olfactory memories of those days all flowed back to me as I watched the tragedy of Annapolis unfold. And I know with certainty that thousands of other journalists who grew up in the newsrooms scattered across the country in the ‘60s and ‘70s all felt the same pangs and sorrow and loss as the names of the five colleagues of the Capital cycled across our televisions, phones, and laptops.

Gerald Fischman, 61. Rob Hiaasen, 59. John McNamara, 56. Rebecca Smith, 34. Wendi Winters, 65.

I never had the pleasure to meet any of them; most journalists across the country did not know them. But we all do know what they did and why they did it. We know the kind of community they served, the world they knew and the work they lived and breathed. We know their labors of truth-telling, of their love for the basic Constitutional freedom they exemplified with each and every edition of the Capital. Your Capital was, by any other name, our Capital

A Pilot's Take On The Turbulent Flight Of Trump

Storm over North Carolina, by Jim Moore

“It seemed hopeless. In twenty minutes of struggle I had not moved forward a hundred yards. What was more, with flying as hard as it was out here five miles from the coast, I wondered how I could possibly buck the winds along the shore, assuming I was able to fight my way in. I was a perfect target for the enemy there on shore. Fear, however, was out of the question. I was incapable of thinking. I was emptied of everything except the vision of a very simple act. I must straighten out. Straighten out. Straighten out.” Antoine St. Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars (published in 1939)

I was born into a family of writers and pilots, took my first transcontinental plane ride on a TWA “Connie” Constellation before I was one, sat in the co-pilot’s seat of a small plane when I was ten, handled the controls of a Cessna when I was eleven, learned to navigate using charts, and stopwatches before I turned 13, and got my pilot’s license just a few years later. Aviator and author Antoine St. Exupery’s books—Wind, Sand and Stars; Night Flight; Flight to Arras (and, yes, The Little Prince)—was with me every step of the way.

During those formative years, one lesson was paramount and hammered into me by Exupery, my instructors, my mother and my father: “Assess and understand your conditions and fly the plane.” That lesson, and the rules of operation and navigation that followed, rested on one non-negotiable fact: Inattention and overconfidence while airborne can kill you. The corollary to that was: the plane can handle a finite number of your mistakes, the operative word being “finite.” We’ll come back to that momentarily.

One of my favorite ground-school subjects was meteorology. To those of you who have seen my seemingly endless supply of cloud pictures, that should come as no surprise. Student pilots quickly develop a very rational respect for the seen and unseen swirling forces that surround our Blue Planet. What might feel like a lovely summer breeze to a ground-bound observer worries the hell out of a 20-hour student pilot intent on completing a short solo flight where the heat of the day lifts and churns the air and hurls burbles of turbulence into the path of a small plane that weighs less than the family SUV. 

Controlling a light plane in less-than-stable air confounds the overloading senses of a young pilot, and every light bump feels like a jarring thud to the seat-of-the-pants student. The temptation is to clutch the wheel or the stick and wrest the craft away from the jaws of destruction and get back down on solid ground. But it’s important to overcome that temptation by chanting the primary mantra: “Fly the airplane.”

Over time, with lots of practice and a good instructor, the anxiety born of turbulence and clouds slowly subsides as the aviator becomes one with the air. In meteorology classes, and in the airborne classroom, pilots learn to recognize the subtle (and not-so-subtle) languages of the troposphere—that thin layer of the atmosphere through which most non-turbine-rated pilots fly. We learn about fronts, high and low pressure, orographic lifting, the adiabatic rate of cooling air, mountain waves, different kinds of ice, the danger of frost on our wings, every cloud type from stratus to cumulonimbus, and the effects of the sun on fields (plowed and unplowed), bodies of water, and concreted-over metropolitan sprawls. If we really put our minds to those lessons, we pilots become weather-whisperers, able to discern from little hints what awaits us in tomorrow’s sky.

We also learn to respect the fundamental strength of the planes we fly. We learn about where and where not to put weight inside our plane; we learn just how much stress our plane’s wings are designed to take; we learn about the inherent and vital flexibility of the fuselage, wings, vertical and horizontal stabilizers, the rudder, elevator, and ailerons. There is a reason why the wings of great airliners flex upward as lift is achieved and gravity is opposed; there is a reason why the cabins of even huge planes like a 747, 777, or an A-380 seems to bend and twist in turbulence: if they did not, if they were built to be rigid, they would snap apart and spill you out. Be grateful, not fearful, then, the next time you are in the midst of a bumpy ride aloft—the flexible tube you are in is keeping you where you belong.

Novice pilots learn that our aerial chariots, while designed and built to be trustworthy containers for us and our passengers, have their limits, and woe to the charioteer who willfully exceeds those parameters. One of the first things pilots learn to do is calculate weight and balance and to consult a very important chart that is part of the plane’s operating handbook to be sure we are not adding too much weight…or putting weight where it does not belong—when we are prepping for a flight. You can throw a ton of junk into the back of your pickup truck, and the worst that will happen is that the back end will sag, and your shocks will take a beating. With planes, even a couple of 40lb. bags improperly placed aft of the cabin can lead to disaster at the end of the runway or later in the flight.

If there is one flying lesson that is hard to learn—the hardest and most severe when not learned—it is when to say “no” to an opportunity to go flying or when, once airborne, it is time to turn around. You would think flying is all about common sense, given the real dangers of screwing up. But too many pilots, now deceased, put more faith in their skills than was merited by the conditions facing them. I have witnessed four plane crashes. Three fatal, one nearly so. 

One was the crash of a charter airliner that the pilots flew into the side of a Colorado mountain in 1970 (30 people died). One was the crash of a small plane into a Colorado beet field after the pilot flew into a thunderstorm and the plane emerged without wings, tail, or elevator like a red and white lawn dart plunging out of the clouds. The third fatal crash happened in 1972 when one of the Thunderbirds experienced a mechanical failure during an airshow at Dulles. The pilot ejected, but his parachute carried him into the fireball of the wrecked plane.

Of those three fatal crashes, the first two occurred because the pilots put themselves into conditions (too low in the high mountains; purposeful flight into a thunderstorm) that neither they nor their airplanes were capable of surviving. In the case of the charter flight, the pilot, already too low in a box canyon (Loveland Pass, for those who want to look on a map), tried to circle his way out of trouble in the high-thin air, and was unable to climb above the tree line on a ridge. As cold-hearted as it might sound, the passengers who died were victims of the pilot’s prime transgression: he willfully put his plane where it never should have been.

In the case of the small plane in the beet field, the pilot put himself and his passenger in mortal peril by penetrating a thunderstorm that was easy to see and avoid. Small planes—and even very large ones—do not do well in the heart of the worst clouds, towering cumulonimbus. The up- and down-drafts are brutal; icing is a problem; lightning can cause vertigo and loss of spatial orientation; and the overall forces can rip the wings off a plane. My B-52-flying father told me that the Strategic Air Command once prohibited bombers from flying in thunderstorms during peacetime missions, and there is a well-documented (with pictures) story of a B-52 that had a good chunk of its vertical stabilizer ripped off by clear air turbulence along the Rockies in the mid-1960s.

Why do some pilots—those dead, and those who are lucky to be alive—put themselves into such unwinnable positions?

They do so out of too much pride, too much hubris, too much complacency, too much misplaced faith in their frail human capabilities, too little thought for the safety--even the lives--of others, too little regard for the limits of their planes, too little respect for the power of the weather. Any one of these attitudes is a weak link in a chain events leading to a fatal crash; put two or more of them together, and the outcome is preordained.

So, too, is the economic, social, and political outcome preordained for a nation ineptly navigated by someone who exhibits almost all of the above traits. The elegantly-winged-document that is our nation’s Constitution was designed to be strong enough to weather most storms by being flexible enough to take the shocks of an abusive presidency or a useless Congress or a contrary Supreme Court. But even a Constitution as strong as ours, as capable as it is of taking us to the upper reaches of the atmosphere where hope and justice, peace and tranquility, equality and happiness overarch a beautiful nation…even such a Constitution cannot long endure the reckless actions of a danger-seeking, self-serving, mentally-deficient pilot.

If we are to take America to the heights of our greatest ambitions and visions, we must take control and fly the plane ourselves. We must start being very afraid of the political weather as we see it play out on social media, cable news, or on the pages of our newspapers. We must trust our instincts and know which way the wind is really blowing and fly accordingly. 

We have an opportunity later this year, and again in 2020, to retake the controls and fly away from the darkening squall line of an impending storm the winds of which we may not be able to survive. We must assure ourselves and our neighbors—our fellow countrymen and our allies—that we are smart enough to know it is time to relieve this insane pilot of his duties and return our flight to a course toward a reachable future for all rather than continue into a wrathful cloud of national crisis where many dreams will perish. 

It is time, America. Straighten Out. Fly the plane.

They Are Teaching Their Children

You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good-bye.

Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they pick’s, the one you'll know by.
Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you will cry,
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you.

And you, of tender years,
Can't know the fears that your elders grew by,
And so please help them with your youth,
They seek the truth before they can die.

Teach your parents well,
Their children's hell will slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they pick’s, the one you'll know by.

Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you will cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.*

I can think of no surer way to raise up a new generation of insurrectionists than by stealing them from their parents and ignoring their innocent and terrified cries. The vineyard of unintended consequences, planted in the acidic soil of the president's hubris and total disdain for humanity, will not fully bear grapes for decades; but when those bitter berries ripen, woe to the nation that sought profits from that vineyard and woe to the vintners who nourished the vines with the tears of babies and desperate parents. There is no more poisonous vintage on earth than that which is pressed from the grapes of terror.

There is also no question that the world at large—particularly those parts of the world led by despots, dictators, and “leaders for life”—is watching America slouch toward irrelevancy with great interest. Our dwindling list of friends and allies may be recoiling in shock (or, maybe, by this point, turning away with a sad shrug) at this administration’s coldly-calculated treatment of refugee families at our Southern border. But the faces of those players who seek to do us harm are not turning away; far from it. They are fascinated and excited by the possibilities of mischief and outright destruction they can wreak on increasingly vulnerable sectors of our country.

In Donald Trump, our friends and enemies see a man who is willing to promote turmoil and leverage grief in order to have his way with Congress which is on the verge of giving the president his wall in order to restore some semblance of humanity along the border. Such a deception is no cure for what truly ails us, and if it teaches our children anything, it is that spinelessness, sycophancy, and silence in the face of bullying are the safest social, moral, and political stances.

What is most troubling to me—beyond the sights and sounds of the refugee families—is the energizing effects these scenes of political and social disarray are having in the planning rooms of every bad actor in the world. We are not only teaching our children to dismiss as fake news the cries of refugee families; we are teaching the children of every nation and organization opposed to America just how fractured, fragmented, and adrift we are within our own borders. These are children of home-grown or foreign terrorists, violent jihadists, gun-for-hire dissidents, Russian computer hackers, social disruptors, and more.

These other children are watching us. The angry parents in these countries and organizations believe America created the hells they lived through, and they are teaching their children well, feeding them on their bitter dreams of revenge, violence and disruption. That is their truth. And their children are learning a dark code to live by. Nothing we are doing on the world stage today refutes their impression of our leaders' fecklessness, disingenuity, and callousness. 

These children will step into their parents’ shoes one day, armed not only with knives, guns, bombs, and trucks, but with cyber tools, political insight, and social media savvy. They will look for the children who Trump locked in cages, and they will recruit as many as they can to their disruptive and deadly causes. Then they will teach them to teach their children. And our hell will not slowly go by…it will stay with us. Because we did not teach our children well enough. That is our truth, and we will cry.

*© Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Spirit Music Group, Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd.

A Tower Of Trumpocracy Will Not Succeed

In closing my last post, I referred to the current president as a “monster,” and, while the writer and lay philosopher in me stands by that term in a metaphorical, perhaps metaphysical, sense, the journalist in me failed to ascribe to him the visible and visceral qualities that reflect the worst of humanity—the worst of the here and now: immorality; faithlessness; brutality; hubris; thuggishness; fear-mongering; bigotry; violence against children and other innocents; willful, even wanton, ignorance of, or self-serving abuse of, any code of law either secular or religious; duplicity; hatred of the dissemination of information through a free press; fealty to, or at least admiration of, dictators; disrespect for the sacrifices and values of allies; and elevation of self above all others. 

These are the most easily-assessed and quantifiable traits of a man whose concept of what it means to be a president of the United States is so skewed and perverted it is not even wrong; it is existentially dangerous. Donald Trump is toxic and corrosive to every moral, ethical, legal, and humane structure underpinning the fabric of the Republic.

He is toxic because he is poisoning honest discourse, polluting the once-free-flowing waters of public information, and contaminating any and all laws that might otherwise ensnare him.

He is corrosive because he is dissolving the trembling bonds that hold us together in the hope that by destabilizing, despoiling, and eventually destructing social and political norms as we know them, he and his deluded followers will rebuild the nation in his Trumpian image—tearing down the shining city on a hill and raising a gilded tower on the Stygian shore.

Now, because the president’s attorney general has opened his Bible to justify the tearing away of children from their mothers, I think it is fair for me to open my Bible to predict the outcome of the president’s plans for his Trump-in-Heaven Tower of Gold. Hmmmm, it seems I’ve selected Genesis 11, verses 1-9 (the King James version is what I have before me).


1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.

3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.

4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.

6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.

9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

I find this selection far more interesting and appropriate to our current situation than the attorney general’s attempt at Biblical rationalization for dissolving families at the border. In the allegory of the Tower of Babel, we can see clearly the existential folly of builders who seek to raise up to heaven a structure—built of “brick and slime”—for the singular purpose of creating a pure community of one voice, one people, unrestrained from doing that “which they have imagined to do.”

And what is it the president imagines to do, once he has dissolved the bonds of justice, silenced his critics, and purified the nation in his image? He imagines he will reshape the presidency to suit his irrational whims of power and glory; he imagines he will be heralded by the world’s despots and feared by the world’s democracies. His gluttony for gold will be unbound, and, thus unrestrained by any irritating fetters of law or morality, he will embark on building a huge and beautiful tower dedicated to Trumpocracy fashioned by his workforce of purified acolytes using the bricks of his ego and the slime of his soul.

But take heart; this is not a Biblical lesson I am preaching. It is a lesson to encourage courage in the face of presidential folly and Congressional acquiescence. We have it in us to confound Trump’s language and to scatter his people like so much dust in the wind. We cannot let the staged drama and lie-filled misdirection of this White House distract us from our true capabilities and mission.

Jeopardized as we might seem to be by the corrosive and poisonous fumes emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, we each have a special HazMat suit to counter those noxious clouds of presidential gas: we have the vote as our protection against the stain of tyranny, and we must put on that suit and wear it to the polls in 2018 and 2020.

Imagine what we can achieve when our nation of individuals—where the idea of “one out of many” still makes sense to most of us—rejects Trump’s egocentric yearnings of grandeur, and stands resolute and hand-in-hand in our mutual desire to work toward perfecting, not dissolving, the bonds of humanity, decency, dignity, and honest struggle that unite us.

The World Turned Upside Down

Here There Be Dragons

There is a story—mostly likely apocryphal—that when the British surrendered at Yorktown, the British army band played “The World Turned Upside Down.” Apocryphal or not, that moment in time did signal a major shift in the then-global political fortunes of our two nations. What happened in 2016 brought to the world stage someone, and some…thing…more disruptive than anything my generation has ever experienced. The world has turned upside down.

We now have a president who casts the ship of state away from the welcoming piers of our allies, and sets a course for the deceitful and unsafe harbors of our enemies. The waters we are now sailing through have been well-marked in the past, with warnings on every previous president's charts that beyond the known routes of safe travel there is terra incognita...and dragons. Yet, toward these inhospitable lands this president is sailing, joyous in his ignorance, ordering up a full head of steam in order to reach the deadly shoals of the Pacific Rim with ever-increasing speed.

We now have members of the cabinet and other men and women who hold high elected or appointed office who resort to Biblical quotations--often out of context--to justify the abomination of child-parent separation at our Southern border. We have cabinet officials for whom the normal rules of the game no longer apply and who flaunt, regularly, their sense of empowerment and entitlement. And the one man who could right such wrongs is no less an empowerment and entitlement animal who thinks nothing of abusing the privilege accorded him by his base of misled voters.

Like the characters in Plato's cave--a 3rd-century BC allegory featured in "The Republic"--we are chained to one wall of a cave and forced to watch shadows of Trump's administration move across the blank wall in front of us. Through Socrates, Plato says the shadows are the uninformed realities of those who are chained; In the 21st century, I say the shadows we see now are the rational fears of those who are chained.

Quite frankly, this administration scares me more with each passing day, and I don’t get it. I don’t understand why or how an entire majority of Congress is cowed into irresponsibility and moral failure; I don’t understand why, after 500+ days of the president’s term, the outrage is not more palpable, counter-reactive, and effective; I don’t understand how a broad swath of Americans is not outraged by the president’s saluting to a North Korean general, or how a substantial number of the electorate accepts like quiet mice the vicious insults to a man like John McCain and to the rule of law and to common decency when it comes to immigrant families. I don’t get it. Just don’t.

And my list of “don’t get-its” gets longer every day. I don’t get lies. I don’t get them when they roll dementedly off the lips of a barely literate leader, and I don’t get them when they are repeated as truth by so many others in and out of the White House. I don’t get how any Oval Office occupant can get away with demeaning the news media with the clear intent of tearing down public trust in what is probably our last remaining bastion of truth-to-power advocacy.

There are too many more “I don’t get-its” for me to post here, and I know many of you could add to the list. I understand the frustrations felt by many Americans who fear disenfranchisement from the original dream; I know too many citizens are vulnerable to snake-oil salesmen who promise much and will deliver nothing but more pain; I even believe many voters had totally legitimate reasons for voting the way they did…I also believe in buyer’s remorse and wish there was more of it now.

But…and here is the hard part for me…I have no voice in this anymore. When I was posting in Huffington, or even when I post here in my blog or on Quora, I thought I was able, as a journalist, to reach beyond my own keyboard to shine some additional light down the dark alleys of legerdemain and outright deceit. But the truth is, while I believe in confronting darkness with my own light, I also am a practical man who sees the futility of speaking out with no credentials, legitimate forum, or reasonable hope of reaching beyond the circle of friends who are already believers.

The depth of my sadness at this reality is more than profound…it is emotionally crippling.

What has happened, along with the world turning upside down, is a polarization of that world…a bifurcation of ideologies tearing our nation apart. I cannot speak to any issue and expect a reasonable, logical, well-crafted, open-to-debate response from the other side. I cannot reach across the aisle with a genuine desire to share a middle ground…the aisle is now an abyss, and the middle ground has been scorched with invective and ad hominem attacks not just against writers like me who know what’s coming, but against anyone who questions the motives, means, and methods of our current administration.

And in the end I’m just an everyman, a one-time reporter and editor whose time has passed. Like many people of my generation, I’m old and getting older, unheard, and forgotten. The country I loved is not the country I’m living in right now; the world I knew—and I’m not talking about some halcyon “Leave it to Beaver” world…I don’t want to go back in time, not at all—is a world that is now sheltering in place, frightened, paralyzed, hyperventilating in a closet of unknowing.

I leave you with this: There is a monster walking down the halls our country. He is knocking on the doors behind which we huddle. We can hear his gun butt splintering our protection. He is turning off the lights of justice, dousing us in the darkness of deceit while he struts with his gang of thugs on a mission to terrorize and subdue a nation that seems incapable of wresting from him his ill-gotten gains. He is laughing at us. He is demented.

Arlington: Save The Chisel and Keep The Lee In Washington-Lee

A few days ago, Kimberly Suiters, an anchor on our local ABC affiliate, posted on Facebook a news story about Washington-Lee High School, long a fixture in North Arlington County (Virginia). The story was about the Arlington County school board giving consideration to removing the Lee from Washington-Lee.

I am a life-long Virginian, raised in the 1950s in North Arlington, then, after my father’s retirement from the military, I lived South Arlington and attended a different Arlington high school (Wakefield), though many of my high school friends and North-side acquaintances were W-L or Yorktown students. Our schools enjoyed an often-fierce rivalry—a semi-bloodless reprise of North vs. South.

Along with her post, Suiters asked, 

“Arlington School Board considering erasing the Lee name ... do you agree or disagree with the proposal?” 

My initial response was, “Disagree. I'm not taking a Confederate position...but I think it's important to look at Lee as a very conflicted warrior who, like the Union's Sherman and Grant, had no taste for war's horrors.”

And I followed that comment up with, “We rush to judge in milliseconds now, when the arc of history tells us that even from the remove of hundreds of years, the great stories of the world do not easily reveal their full scope.”

The yays and nays followed swiftly and predictably, including:

“Disagree. To judge Lee as unworthy of being remembered and honored for his contributions to the nation and reconciliation afterwards; is to deny our nation’s truth and Lee’s role in our history. He is worthy to be remembered and no one should erase his memory from our history.”

“Agree. Lee, in choosing to fight in support of the Confederacy, was a traitor to our country. Traitors do not deserve honor.”

“[Disagree] Might as well take the Washington off too since he was a slave owner. One generation shouldn't judge the morals, values and standards to the ones of past generations. What seems abhorrent to us by our standards today was life then, as I'm sure our morals and standards of today have these past generations rolling in their graves. Judge them for the times, the conditions and standards of their time not ours. Keep the name!”

And, of course, there was the usual outlier, who chimed in with, “God bless the snowflakes!”

As the comments came in, Suiters added an important link to the post, writing:

“There are some who argue, after surrender, Lee was part of this country's reconciliation. History, like everything, is not black and white.” 

And she added this link: https://www.virginiahistory.org/.../lee.../reconciliation

In the article, Lee is quoted as saying, “…all should unite in honest efforts to obliterate the effects of war and to restore the blessings of peace." Lee vowed to do "all in my power to encourage our people to set manfully to work to restore the country, to rebuild their homes and churches, to educate their children, and to remain with their states, their friends and countrymen."

So, let’s back off a bit and look at the issue not just from 30,000 feet, or even the distance of 150 years, but from the perspective of the much larger arc of history.

There is no doubt that Lee’s pre-war personal life was consistent with that of many slave owning families, and that, depending on which biographer you read, he was not sympathetic to the abolitionists of the day and was not above having fugitive slaves returned as his property. Having complicated his father-in-law’s last wishes in 1857 to emancipate the Custis’s slaves within five years of Custis’s death. 

Lee left military service to oversee the plantation and its slaves. Stories of him personally beating or whipping slaves (The Norris Case)—notably a woman, Mary Norris, stripped to her waist—are inconsistent, incongruent, and remain unresolved. It is true that he did not honor fully a family commitment to release the family’s slaves after the death of Custis, and that, along with his rough treatment as an overseers, is a dishonorable stain that cannot be cleansed by any rewriting of history.

And yet Lee himself had done much to work—in an often-backhanded way—toward the abolition of slavery, and, by 1862, had released the last of the slaves he owned. In his 1997 book, “Robert E. Lee, a Biography,” author Emory Thomas cites one of Lee’s letters in which Lee said, “In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country.” 

Yet, while he accepted slavery as a necessary evil toward the advancement of the Southern economy (while presuming, irrationally, that slaves were better off in America than in their native lands), he also expressed his belief that one day slavery would cease, but only by the just hand of God and not by the hands of men through political strife and war.

There is little doubt of Lee’s initial affection and sense of duty to the Union as he knew it as a star West Point cadet (and, eventually as the military academy’s commandant), and as an officer engaged in close combat, and wounded, in the Mexican campaign under General Winfield Scott (1846-48).

As the North and South ratcheted up the tensions leading to the war, Lee was in constant conflict between his loyalty to the Union, and his even-deeper loyalty to his home state of Virginia. He was loath to take up arms against Virginia, and his resignation from the Union army was one of the great disappointments of the Union’s military leaders of his day. In an 1861 letter to his father-in-law, George Washington Custis, Lee expressed his deepest fears about the looming war, and its futility and shaming of the express views of the Founders:

“The South, in my opinion, has been aggrieved by the acts of the North, as you say. I feel the aggression, and am willing to take every proper step for redress. It is the principle I contend for, not individual or private benefit. As an American citizen, I take great pride in my country, her prosperity and institutions, and would defend any State if her rights were invaded. But I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than a dissolution of the Union. It would be an accumulation of all the evils we complain of, and I am willing to sacrifice everything but honor for its preservation. I hope, therefore, that all constitutional means will be exhausted before there is a resort to force. Secession is nothing but revolution. The framers of our Constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom, and forbearance in its formation, and surrounded it with so many guards and securities, if it was intended to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will. It was intended for "perpetual union," so expressed in the preamble, and for the establishment of a government, not a compact, which can only be dissolved by revolution, or the consent of all the people in convention assembled.”

To me, the key phrase in this letter is, “But I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than a dissolution of the Union. It would be an accumulation of all the evils we complain of, and I am willing to sacrifice everything but honor for its preservation.”

Can you imagine the conflict eating away at Lee’s intellect and heart over the choice about to be thrust upon him? He was a man torn apart by the duality of his pragmatism toward slavery and the South’s right to tend its own affairs, and his ideological love of the United States and his affection for the core foundation of the Constitution.

It is to Lee’s discredit, in my opinion, that after the Civil War, Lee rejected or simply ignored—through silence—opportunities to speak out on behalf of freed slaves and lend his once-respected voice to those, like Andrew Johnson, who used Reconstruction as a devastating weapon against black interests. He could have done much, post-war, to heal some of the South’s self-inflicted wounds; that he chose not to remains one of history’s biggest lessons in disappointment.

But, it is to his credit that Lee did attempt to help Virginia make strides toward improved education, and he did champion free education for blacks, though he drew the line at supporting black voting rights. His tenure as president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) is generally praised, and, in an act of reconciliation, Lee accepted an invitation to meet with President Grant at the White House.

On a personal note, I must point out that Arlington County schools have enjoyed a reputation as excellent institutions of learning—whether it is my old school, Wakefield, or Yorktown, or Washington-Lee. In poll after poll, Arlington schools rank at the top of all schools statewide (though Fairfax’s Thomas Jefferson Science and Technology is the rare list buster). According to Niche’s 2018 rankings, Arlington County schools ranked first in best places to teach in Virginia, best school district in Virginia, and best teachers out of all 131 Virginia school districts.

The county’s education board has a long record of progressive oversight and policy-making that encouraged its system of schools to advance new ideas over old, to refresh the zeal for learning in so many students, to set high standards for academic achievement, and to help students refine their aims for higher education. Nothing in a name can change that.

No student attends a public school for partisan or philosophical reasons; they attend in part because they have to according to the law and within their various districts, and in part because the school either keeps them engaged or the students simply put up with the routine until they can graduate. Removing Lee’s name from W-L will not lead to increased motivation, or even higher standards of academic rigor, or graduation outcomes. 

I’m not saying W-L students don’t have a right to have a say in the proposed excising of Lee’s name from their school; what I am saying is that a name change will not raise the fundamental principles of educational excellence upon which W-L, and all Arlington County schools are founded and operate.

If the county education board succeeds in removing Lee’s name from Washington-Lee, the board members will be sending a signal to the current student body and the generations to come (and the parents and residents of Arlington County) that inconvenient truths—uncomfortable as they may make us—can simply be chiseled away rather than addressed in reasonable colloquy and sensible debate.

I just can't demonize Lee to the extent some folks do, and, as a conflicted man myself—and as a proud graduate of an Arlington County school, I worry about the trend of rewriting history down to this level.