Our youth have decided that various memorials to past events are offensive and are demanding that they be torn down. Nothing new – the Soviets did it in their attempt to re-write the past. Now American youth are doing it. Only a matter of time before the “wretched refuse” of Liberty gets under their skin. Even now, there is a move afoot to rename George Washington University inasmuch as he held slaves and cannot be touted as a moral man.
There is a part of me that would rather not put up any statues at all. You know, save the money, and all that. Naming buildings after politicians, alive or dead, has always struck me as self-referential and a waste of taxpayer funds. Still, we do it and every time I cross an MLK boulevard somewhere I am want to pause and reflect on what King had to say and what he stood for. There is now an Obama middle school in Los Angeles and while I wasn’t a fan of the President, I appreciate that he was a hero to some. Certainly the way I feel when I fly through Reagan National in Washington D.C.
Peggy Noonan writes:
Keeping names and statues serves as “a stimulus to modesty.” It reminds us how hard it has been to reach the more advanced position we hold today. It reminds us that even we, “with our more enlightened ideals, are human beings, with the same imperfections as our predecessors, bedeviled by the same tendency to overestimate ourselves.”
Shouldn’t we remember that we are no more able to see things in a perfect light than our ancestors were? The impulse to tear down “destroys the bridge of sympathy between the present and the past” and “invites a swaggering pride that weakens the power of moral imagination itself.”
Such memorials are like “thorns in our side,” reminding us “that others in the past, with human shortcomings like ours, have not always lived up to the better angels of their nature, and that we shall fail to do so as well. They remind us our moral achievements are hard-won and never entirely secure.”
What will be the moral achievements of our youth? Will they sit around in a stoned stupor, in their rocking chairs someday and reminisce about how they tore down the Statue of Liberty? “What was that, Grandpa?” “Oh, it was a stupid gift from France that white nationalists thought was worth keeping, but we-showed-them.”
