Where Do You Stand On Tearing Down Statues Across America
Somehow taking down a statue is supposed to make things better, by erasing history? I don't get it. Awful or not, either something happened or it didn't. Robert E. Lee lead the Army of Northern Virginia against the Union whether there is a granite or iron image of him doing so or not. Newsflash - the civil war happened. Slavery happened. We've come a long way since 1865 and yes, we still have a ways to go. But how does tearing down statues help change someone's heart, especially given some of the statues that have been destroyed?
The protests that have been held since George Floyd's death have led to protesters pulling down a number of Confederate statues. But is seems the mobs can't differentiate as to who it is that's being pulled off the pedestals.
The Associate Press reports that a statue and memorial to George Washington in a Baltimore park were vandalized with red paint, the words "Destroy Racists" and the initials for Black Lives Matter. Statues were pulled down in California over the weekend of: former President Ulysses S.Grant who commanded the Union Army that defeated the Confederacy.
Francis Scott Key who wrote "The Star Spangled Banner" had to fall as did an image of Spanish missionary Junipero Serra, who brought Catholicism to the west.
President Theodore Roosevelt never owned slaves -no matter, he has to go too from out front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Mayor Bill Mayor Bill de Blasio said Sunday they will remove a prominent statue of Theodore Roosevelt from its entrance after years of objections that it symbolizes colonial expansion and racial discrimination,
The bronze statue that has stood at the museum’s Central Park West entrance since 1940 depicts Roosevelt on horseback with a Native American man and an African man standing next to the horse.
“The American Museum of Natural History has asked to remove the Theodore Roosevelt statue because it explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior,”
https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/addressing-the-theodore-roosevelt-statue/making-the-statue
The architect of the memorial specified a “heroic group” of three men, while other sources at the time describe the two men with Roosevelt as gun bearers. The sculptor wrote that the two men were guides and could be seen to stand for “Roosevelt’s friendliness to all races.” The meaning of these figures is complicated and hard to untangle.
Hard to untangle? Ok, offense is in the eye of the beholder so the statue has got to go.
Could party politics be at play here, at least with the removal the confederate statues? 53% of Democrats say the statues should come down; 71% of Republicans say they should remain standing.
What do you say?
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