Reconciliation was only part of the equation. Every single Confederate traitor should have hanged from a noose. Every piece of pro-slavery propaganda should have been burned down. The lionization of Confederate generals and politicians should have been stopped. The romantization of the South during the Civil War should have been stamped out at its earliest signs. The racism used to justify the enslavement of black people and later to terrorize, disenfranchise, economically harm, and murder them should have been made illegal from the very start of Reconstruction.

All this evil slowly rotted away at the social fabric of this country until where we are now. We now have those who wish to racially purify this country through increasingly violent and less democratic means, those who wish to stop them but are paralyzed by the legal hurdles put in place by Confederate apologists, and the apathetic ones who are too tired and burned out to even know the world is burning around them.