I have been puzzling over the sudden movement to remove statues of Confederate generals and governmental officials. I do believe that it involves more than cultural correctness. There is something immature yet obsessive about America's unwillingness to see imperfections in its national family tree as being the misadventures of youth; America must punish its miscreants as the "new Salem witches" against whom no mercy can be shown lest the power of the witches smite us first. This is so even though the original offenders were severely punished in and during their time of sinning. Where did we ever get the idea that our ancestors were saintly people?
Personally, I believe that African American's evolving, ballooning obsession with their ancestors' prior condition of slavery, if that was the case, is unhealthy. It has become the correlative of the Jews' holocaust. Needless to say, embellishment is the kindest characterization of claims made in either case. I think it becomes significantly more difficult for America's leadership to look wisely ahead, when nearly everything must be weighed by the wounds allegedly inflicted in the past.
Whatever justice may be due to those whose grandparents never knew the yoke of slavery, surely seeing racism & hate in every antique brick or patchwork shawl constitutes grasping at straws -- at best.
The under-achievement of African Americans in America surely is partially explained by impediments legally put in their way which blocked their reasonable expectation of "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." When legal impediments have been removed and legal advantages obtained to provide a sort of turbo-propulsion as recompense for "injustices of the past," then, after a couple of generations, the time draws near for a return to government maintaining an even field by means of normal procedures such as anti-trust litigation, etc. Then, unalienable rights belong to all, and obsessive legal scrutiny to obtain uneven civil rights, based on racial or religious factors, will seem less compelling.
My fear is that a more dangerous energy is afoot in the land. I associate the pulling-down of statues as the act of revolutionaries. Wherever revolutionaries perceive in a statue the image of tyranny, as with Saddam Hussein in Iraq, they pull it down. Marxists do it, Jihadists do it, even liberal democrats do it (effigies, anyway).
The people who are tolerating the "removal" (democrat euphemism for pulling it down) of the statue of General Robert E. Lee from small parks in America join their less couth comrades who have been determined to pull down or soil this statue as a revolutionary gesture. It is the return of occupation mobs, as opposed to troops, to finish the Reconstruction of the South, which is already reeling from wholesale nation-poaching /squatting. Where anchors in society are removed, drifting is the most likely "progress."
Therefore, I oppose the attempted "make-over" of the South, as I do that of England, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Germany, Australia, etc. There is an old expression that it takes seven scars to make a man. Severe wounds may leave an ugly scar or lost limb. Lets help the wounded get over their wounds. Let's move on, bearing in our minds an idea of a better future.
If Robert E. Lee cannot be tolerated as a statue on park land because confused minds meld in mobs intent on mischief, supposing him to be a "hate-crime" merchant and defender, when will the same mob come to Washington to tear the racist constitution for America in twain? Isn't the sudden push for a completed Reconstruction of the South now just a "first act" in a national drama, written by a playwright(s) incensed at the limitations on "government rights" accorded by the United States constitution. Did not Justice Ginsburg advise budding nations to select or devise a constitution which is not modeled on the United States one? Did not Bill Clinton whisper to his British counterpart, Tony Blair, that he (Blair) did not have to deal with a damn constitution as President Clinton had to (re gun control).
The United States presently has many globalists who have managed to chisel away a goodly chuck of U.S. sovereignty by means of the Treaty-making clause of the U.S. constitution. The United Nations has been used for years as the platform for such initiatives, all parties involved understanding the legal force of a treaty specifically in America. Otherwise, it might be termed an Agreement or Accord. The constitution does need this flaw fixed to preserve it.
Even so, a rowdy street faction can make a mass of apathetic people part like the Red Sea did, when Moses shook his staff. Since one can count on white America to side with the mob (never termed as such by the major media), things may get down right dangerous. Rule of thumb: Don't hide behind a statue of an American hero, 'cause it's coming down.