Last week a friend sent me a cartoon of two beekeepers in their bee suits standing next to a disturbed hive of bees, some of which are angrily swarming around the head of their unmasked companion.

One of the veiled beekeepers, who is holding an extra mask at his side, is saying to the other, “I told him, as an expert in the field, I strongly recommend wearing it, but he just kept bringing up his rights.”

Wear a mask in public and practice social distancing. Really, it’s not much to ask.

Yet, there are those who resist the idea, saying they don’t like the government telling them what to do. Never mind that government is already in every aspect of our lives.

How do you explain all the sound and fury?

Is it a display of allegiance to a president, who has refused to wear a mask, save for a recent visit to wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital? Is it a refusal to acknowledge that COVID-19 even exists, that it is fake news?

Despite a local ordinance, there were patrons and at least one prominent vendor not wearing masks at Saturday’s Hitching Lot Farmers Market.

I asked the market manager if he had said something to those not wearing masks.

“I’m not going to have someone pull a gun on me,” he said.

Wearing a mask is not only an acknowledgment of the virulence of the virus, it is a visible show of concern for our neighbors and townspeople. It telegraphs the message, “I care about your good health, neighbor.”

What is objectionable about that?

What does it say when you go into a business and none of the employees are wearing masks? Is it a blatant indifference to the welfare of their customers?

Maybe it’s a Southern thing. We southerners don’t like Washington telling us what to do.

We went to war over that back in 1861.

We’re still struggling with vestiges of it. A war over the institution of slavery. A war of rebellion.

Fortunately, we were unsuccessful. And I say “we” as a proud Southerner, who loves his homeland.

The killing of an unarmed George Floyd in Minneapolis by a policeman, the vote to change the state flag and, closer to home, the misguided comments of Lowndes Supervisor Harry Sanders have created the impetus that seems to have made the removal of the Jim Crow-era Confederate statue from the Lowndes County Courthouse an urgent necessity.

Initially the idea of moving it to Friendship Cemetery seemed like a good idea.

Maybe it was the $100,000-plus cost quoted to move the statue. Maybe it was the realization if this edifice is a monument to a morally repugnant crusade to perpetuate human bondage and succession from the Union, why should we preserve it at all?

Billy Hairston, who has family buried in Friendship Cemetery (Billy’s father was once mayor of Columbus) and the rare ability to distill an issue to a few sentences, said as much in a letter to the editor last week:

“Everything about this entire monument is antithetical to the name Friendship Cemetery. I do not want it looking down on my family and friends.”

Billy also noted how, thanks to the immense size of the monument, it would tower over the cemetery, creating an eyesore.

Another letter writer, A.B. Douglas of Caledonia, suggested letting citizens have a go at the monument with a sledge hammer and use the rubble created to repair county roads.

Some see the removal of the Confederate statue from the courthouse lawn as an unmerited acquiescence.

I beg to differ.

Were we to peaceably dispose of that monument, that paean to a war fought to preserve the practice of human bondage, it would exhibit wisdom, strength and grace. In doing so we would offer a rare example of a community willing to grapple with and resolve a perplexing moral issue.

That would be a bit of good news in a time when good news is a scarce commodity.

Birney Imes ([email protected]) is the former publisher of The Dispatch.

Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.