For the last couple of weeks, the news has pinpointed America's problem. To battle this enemy, marchers have protested in the streets, beating each other with club and fist. Policemen report being doused with urine, and sadly a young lady lost her life when a car intentionally barreled into an angry crowd. The battle is real...at least to a segment of America. We are waging a war against statues.
Yes, statues.
Monuments erected to commemorate historical events and people are dropping faster than the University of Missouri's enrollment numbers. It's sad, really. Yes, statues honoring Confederate soldiers stir strong feelings in Americans. For those whose ancestors bore the stripes of slavery, the effigies cause emotional distress; for others, the sculptures help us remember our American history, dark though, portions may be.
And that's the key. We must remember.
A very vocal faction of our society concerns itself primarily with erasing and revising our history. If we are not careful, future generations stand to only know what the educational system wants them to know even if that means whitewashing over our Country's storied past. Knocking a memorial figure from its pedestal doesn't erase the checkered history, it only forces it "out of sight, out of mind." And therein lies the problem.
Philosopher George Santayana once said, "Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it." These statues afford people the opportunity of discussing the past and to collaborate on ways to insure that such atrocities, like slavery, never happen again. But what happens when we erase any vestige of unattractive history from our collective minds? And who decides what needs to be deleted from out text books and public squares? Conservative pundit Michelle Malkin recently said "...parents need to take control as primary educational providers in teaching their children history instead of hiding it from them."
I want to close with one excerpt from George Orwell's classic 1984 .
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
Is this who we are?
Better yet, is this who we want to be?