OPINION:
A crowd of ignorant protesters pulled down a bronze Confederate statue that stood before a county government building in Durham, North Carolina — the angry national backlash to the Charlottesville brouhaha over the Robert E. Lee monument.
This is not how civil societies operate. And yet this is what the left has brought, and now cheers.
What’s next — burning books with offensive content?
Burning books written by those who used to own slaves? At the very least, museums will have to go.
The problem with revising history based on a standard of “feeling offensive” — as this anti-Confederate craze is rooted — is that someone, somewhere will always take offense at something.
For instance, once upon a time in America, women couldn’t vote for the president of this country. Neither could non-property owners, for the most part, or Indians, in addition to blacks. That’s offensive. Shall we tear down American flags — destroy copies of the Constitution — in symbolic protest of the bondage and discrimination to which these so-deemed second-class members of society were subjected? Or should we just go for the big score and burn down the Rotunda of the National Archives Building, where the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are stored?
What’s more, women ought to feel particularly slighted by the fact that blacks were given the constitutional right to vote decades before they were. Just ask Susan B. Anthony, who was arrested a couple years after the 14th and 15th amendments were passed, all for the crime of trying to vote. Shall women, say, tear down the Martin Luther King Jr. monument in Washington, D.C., because it’s an offensive reminder of the failure of America to pass the 19th Amendment until 1920, roughly 50 years after blacks won their voting rights?
Ridiculous.
But then again, so is this, from The Washington Post: “With a strap tied around the neck of the [Confederate] statue, [N.C.] protesters spat, kicked and gestured at the mangled figure after its base was ripped from the granite block. The statue, which depicts a uniformed and armed Confederate soldier, stood atop an engraved pedestal that read, ’In memory of ’the boys who wore the gray.’ “
Nice. So a crowd of radical socialist-minded protesters pulled down a monument which had stood since 1924 to honor the Americans who fought bravely in the Civil War. And this is what the left is cheering — a public show of thuggery and force that’s akin to the face-spitting of U.S. soldiers returning home from Vietnam?
This revisionism of history, based on the feelings of a select few has to stop.
“Charlottesville and racist monuments across the country are the result of centuries of white supremacy,” said one member of the Workers World Party Durham branch that participated in the illegal destruction of property protest, the Washington Post reported.
Arrest them.
But more importantly, oppose and shame them.
Those who don’t know history are fated to relive it. If nothing else, Confederate monuments should stand as a reminder of America’s history and an opportunity for passersby to reflect.
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