I live just a few blocks from Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia

I was born and raised in Richmond. My family goes back in VA as far along every branch of my family tree as we've researched. I'm the descendant of dozens of Confederate volunteers, and I currently live just a few blocks from Richmond's Monument Avenue, where we have memorials to J.E.B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee, among others.

It has been a long week, here. A lot of very deep nerves have been plucked from numerous angles, not just in my city and commonwealth, but in myself. Headlines and characterizations I've read have driven me from feelings of despair and fear to rage and resentment and back again.

I have done my best not to give in to the extremes of emotion and the last two days I have taken time here and there to mull over my own responsibility for the situation we're in, and what is within my power to change. The post below, largely written for myself, was as concise a statement as I could manage to cover my conclusions. I wanted to share it here to take advantage of the potential "outsourced sanity" of feedback from a thoughtful crowd of people who span not only the US but the globe. Do you think I'm aiming in the best direction?

Thanks, buckos:

The greatest way to honor Robert E. Lee or your heritage is to educate yourself. For instance: read Douglas Freeman's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the man, or "Lee's Lieutenants," which details the personalities and the tactics of other commanders in the Civil War and inspired Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower, and George Marshall - among others - as they led the Allies in the war against National Socialism. Then speak the truth about what you learn with courage, and endeavor to emulate what you find most admirable about those men in your own life.

If we don't care enough to learn about the great individuals of the past and from them, equestrian statues - however beautiful and aesthetically integral to the fabric of our communities they may be - are not going to stand in for that lack of knowledge and understanding.

The destruction of the statues is just the final, objective manifestation of our more abstract failure to forge a relationship with our civilization's roots. If we would avoid the myopic demonization of characters from our history, we must wholeheartedly work to identify, honor, and manifest the best aspects of that history in the present, while humbly repenting of its sins and acknowledging that we are ALL just as capable of perpetrating evil as those who walked before us.