Don't know if any of you guys noticed this cause for some reason it's not national news. But the city Council in New Orleans has voted 5 to 1 to remove 4 statues around the city. People are both celebrating and protesting. This could get ugly.
Even more depressing than the pusillanimity here is the utter imbecility. As the great historian Herbert Butterfield wrote in 1931: “The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word 'unhistorical’.”
In every age, some people like to posture by comparing their ethical standards favourably to that of a past generation. It’s the most facile kind of virtue signalling, because it allows you to look down on dead heroes. Thomas Jefferson may have written the most sublime constitution on Earth, but he owned slaves! Winston Churchill may have saved Europe from Nazism, but he had unenlightened views about India! Florence Nightingale may… oh, you get the idea.
People calmed down once they realized that Jackson Square wasn't going to be touched.
Edited to add - the statues are being moved to either a museum or a dedicated civil war park.
I hadn't read that part but I will miss driving around Lee circle.
Jackson is a poorly understood man, so it's only a matter of time before they come calling for his head as well.
What gets me is the fact many other Civil War Confederate monuments/statues in the Southeast are not being touched.
The law in Virginia prevents municipalities from taking them down. It would have to go through the state house, and it would never get traction there.
Salisbury, NC has a statue of an Angel carrying a Confederate Solderer. It's really sobering to see.
http://docsouth.unc.edu/commland/monument/67/
If putting them in a museum (assuming that's what happens) saves them from this bullshit:
...It's probably the best way to protect them. They'd be destroyed by vandals eventually.
We’re still here, say the flags. There are more of them every year, and they appear to be the most visible aspect of that coalescing English voice, one that hasn’t been heard for a long time, but which is growing in volume. What that voice will end up saying is now the big question.
A nation, in other words, is about belonging – to a specific place that is not quite like another place, and to a collective of people you share things with. This kind of belonging can be stifling or liberating, and sometimes both at once, but at its best it gives us a mooring in space and time, without which we are liable to be washed away.