What will future generations think of us? We take away monuments in the dead of the night. We spit on the graves of our ancestors in the light of day.
The usual suspects: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis have got to be removed. Now, not only monuments to the Confederacy or Generals or s
lavery are slated to be removed. They are statues remembering the sacrifices and suffering of ordinary soldiers.
Common men in the South had no preference for slavery. They owned no slaves. Instead, his earnings were reduced because they had to compete with slave labor. When the call went out to defend his country, he took the patriotic bait, as men always do. More than a quarter of a million men died on the Confederate side.
Vandals, and legislators of all stripes, have moved on to other historical figures. In my city of Philadelphia, a former no nonsense police chief and mayor from the 1970/80s, Frank Rizzo’s statue has been spray painted. Statues of Christopher Columbus are being deemed worthy of standing. Even William Penn is in peril. He not only hoodwinked the Native Americans, he also owned slaves. All the while establishing a Quaker prescience.
George Washington…what an abhorrent figure. He owned 317 slaves. Didn’t he know that slavery was bad? Jefferson, too. And Madison. And Monroe. Jackson. Van Buren. Tyler. Harrison. Polk. Johnson. And even Ulysses S. Grant. What a bunch of idiots!
Incidentally, Robert E. Lee emancipated his slaves ten years before the civil war.
We are so much wiser…so much smarter…so much better now.
And while we are rooting out all symbols of slavery, take the cranes and the dynamite to those slave built monuments in Europe and North Africa as well. The Pyramids in Egypt. The Parthenon and the Acropolis in Greece. The Colosseum in Italy
Why stop there? What about the Kabba in Mecca, the Taj Mahal in India, the Mayan Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, and Angkor Wat? And what about the works of Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Sun Tzu, Dante, and Virgil. Who brought them beverages? Who cleaned their houses? Surely their books-monuments to these dumbbells-should be burned.
Let’s get a little closer to home. What about the Bible and the Koran? Horrific stories peppered with slaves of every sort.
All vestiges of the evil past should be razed to the ground. We will rid the world of every trace of slavery once and for all. And live in the perfection that we – all knowing, never erring – deserve. For now, finally, after so many centuries, we have reached some peak of moral and intellectual superiority. We know truth.
Now we know that yesterday’s figures were traitors and terrorists. Yesterday’s great thinkers were morons. What will future generations think of our hubris…the intolerance…the gall…of people who judge their fathers and grandfathers so harshly and so earnestly believe they are smarter and better than the 10,000 generations that preceded them.
“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.”
George Orwell, 1984