It’s funny that those who warn that placating a mob won’t satisfy the mob are vindicated when slippery slope worries once again manifest themselves. Some vandal took it upon himself, herself, ____self and destroyed a statue representing a man from the Revolutionary War era. Again, this isn’t about the civil war or slavery or anything notable. This is an attack on civil and democratic self governance. It’s an attempt to build a climate where if you aggrieved or offended or outraged you can round up a shrill group and destroy things.
The end game isn’t confederate imagery. The end game isn’t a statue of Lincoln, a portrait of Wilson, or Thomas Jefferson. The question is: what is the end game? Can anyone honestly answer what price in terms of destroyed statues, paintings, and street renamings would satisfy the portion of society that is seeking outrage?
This is why I take a zero inch (mm for our foreign readers) approach to concessions on symbolism. The only thing compromise signals is weakness.
Now real issues such as when segregation was the law? Sure, do what you must to get equal rights under the law. But to have these violent protests and acts of vandalism over statues? That’s nuttiness and shouldn’t be supported or tolerated by any political opportunist. Which, actually, ties in perfectly with the psychopathic/sociopathic political thread.
OMG, an individual committed a crime. It’s meaning is so meaningful. I feel like the whole world is slippery and a giant slope is ahead. What are we to do?
Events haven’t unfolded. I don’t give a fuck about random acts of vandalism. They signify zero. It’s always simple: monuments to traitors perpetuating slavery don’t belong on American soil. Period. Full stop. No sophistry, no tortuous reasoning, no semantic games, no equivocation. They should never have been allowed, and they shouldn’t be allowed.
Horseshit. To start with, let me assure you that I as a diehard liberal am strongly opposed to the illegal defacement or destruction of any public monument by vandalism, whether the perpetrators’ motives be political or just plain mischievous or anything in between.
But that doesn’t mean that municipalities and other jurisdictions shouldn’t legally move or remove such monuments when they think it’s the right thing to do. Claiming that a few acts of vandalism mean that we as a society have to adopt a policy of refusing ever to alter any forms of public commemoration whatsoever is flat-out ridiculous.
(And while we’re apportioning blame for the ginning-up of public controversies, it would behoove conservatives in general to discourage their “alt-right” radical fringe from using legal removals of public monuments as an excuse for concerted displays of nakedly racist and antisemitic intimidation and terrorist violence.)
