Leland, Mississippi, is scheduled to dedicate a new military monument that is disrespectful to combat veterans and a bastardization of what a military shrine should be. Combat Veterans USA is calling for the project to be abandoned or significantly altered. Read more below:
“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”
― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis
It’s the ethics, Stupid!
In some parts of the Mississippi Delta, even in 2026, it’s no social faux pas to populate your Social Media feeds with Johnny Reb, and doing so may even boost your cachet, your prestige among the Bubbas of the Deep South — of whom, sadly, there’s no shortage.
But it’s the ethics we’re concerned with. Social norms may vary from group to group, but core human values such as compassion, decency, and fairness cross social boundaries.
How you define the boundaries define you.
We have the right to free speech in the United States, so a retired military officer or noncom who advocates for the Lost Cause ideology, romanticizes the Confederacy, or speaks in favor of white supremacy — however adroitly — is more or less on solid legal ground. Ethically, though, that man is in the swamp.
He has defined himself to decent men in a way that can’t be undone. We have seen his lack of compassion. His descent into indecency. It’s not something one can unsee.
Leland has reason to worry over military wall
The community of Leland might well have reason to worry about its citizen’s competencies at self governance in light of the new “Wall of Honor” taking shape within days on the grounds of the public library.
The wall is going up with almost no community discussion, and even less thought and introspection about what it is, exactly, we are memorializing with this monument to the commonest of military achievements.
Some 200,000 men and women complete U.S. military service each year, and that along with a residency requirement is the sole criteria for having one’s name engraved on the Leland monument. This goes beyond even cultural homogenization. It ventures into the realm of crab mentality — fellow crabs pulling down any member who tries to escape over the walls of the bucket — or the tall poppy syndrome, cutting everyone down to size.
Military monuments are intended to recognize exceptional service, but the Leland monument recognizes the ordinary. In doing so, it dilutes the impact all other monuments have. This kind of “mission creep” or “content creep” among military monuments should be avoided.
Backers of the wall have said there are nearly 6,000 names in the offing to be included on the wall, with more than 2,000 of those already vetted. They also have said it will include the names of new Leland area veterans in perpetuity, forever and ever — which only makes current ideas for the wall as silly, as ridiculous as the original idea that hatched this malformed monument to mediocrity.
We might instead have created a monument to Leland Medal of Honor recipient Master Sgt. Hubert Lee and the dozen or so other veterans who in past years have died in combat or have been recognized for heroic or valorous contributions during their military years.
Leland has no such monument, and now it almost certainly never will. Instead we have a monument that cheapens the ideas of sacrifice and valor. We have a monument to the crab mentality, not heroism or valor.
What were they thinking, these wall backers?
Citizens have a civic obligation to demand the highest of standards from anyone claiming to represent their interests, journalist Adrienne LaFrance has argued, “regardless of whether that person is an elected official of simply a fellow citizen.”
We’ve questioned the standards of the primary wall proponent elsewhere, and there’s no need to relitigate that here except to stress once again that anything resembling a pro-slavery outlook is disqualifying from the get-go. What concerns us here, today, are the standards they have set for us, for the Leland community.
At the very least they should have had to air the standards for their wall in a public forum. It’s not enough either to tell us that veterans organizations signed off on the design for this wall. Anyone who recalls the VFW’s posture toward Vietnam veterans after that war will understand the lack of respect we might have for the opinions of veterans organizations.
This sort of undertaking requires community vetting. It hasn’t gotten that.
It’s impossible to imagine that the Leland community would have approved of a monument so fundamentally disrespectful to veterans as this one. I mean, what the heck are we commemorating here apart from simple service itself.
And to do that we keep all the crabs in the bottom of the bucket. We cut everyone down to our small size. The Medal of Honor recipient, the heroes, the war dead — all are listed with no distinction alongside those who simply served.
For a vet, it doesn’t get any more disgraceful than that.