Nelson County Rocks

    

     

   

        

The scenes above are ones I could scarcely have imagined when I moved down here in the pre-Trump era.  Ostensibly to oppose Charlottesville’s plan to move the Robert E. Lee statue, located in the newly-named Emancipation Park, to a different site, a large and motley collection of “Alt-Right” partisans arrived on August 11th to make their intimidating presence known on the University of Virginia campus, and then to engage in large-scale thuggery the following day, along with running street battles with local counter-protesters.  In an act of domestic terrorism, one of their number deliberately drove his car into the crowd of counter-protestors, injuring many and killing Heather Heyer, age 32, whose courage and life was celebrated at a memorial service at the Paramount Theater the following week.  A truly tragic and ominous day.

Click here for an impressive video, Charlottesville: Race and Terror,  of that fateful day (not sure how long this link will work, but try…)

While the issue of the Robert E. Lee statue became obscured in the following outrage over President Trump’s reluctance to address this display of racial superiority and violence, and was mainly a pretext for a public display of racism and violence, I do feel that the issue of what to do with the monuments to the Confederacy remains an important one.  For me, the Mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, has laid out the case for change very powerfully in the speech linked below:

click here for Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s moving and impassioned speech

Here are a few pictures from the one-night stopover of Felix and his parents.   (Click on picture to see larger image.)