Why Cities Shouldn’t Take Down Confederate Statues

Severing our roots to this country’s history—warts and all—will turn the United States into little more than a listless, economic behemoth, with no past and no future.

Heritage

"Social justice warriors seem to have hit a wall in American politics.
Perhaps sensing that their attempts to fundamentally transform America through top-down control have reached their limit, they are doubling down on reshaping America from the ground up.
"Their new favorite target is American history, and they are starting with low-hanging fruit: Confederate monuments.
"Activists are stridently taking their crusades from the college campus to a town near you, systematically pushing cities to change street names, tear down statues, and even dig up bodies to cleanse America of its Confederate vestiges.
"Last Friday, the mayor of Baltimore announced that the city will follow in the footsteps of New Orleans, and consider the removal of numerous Confederate monuments throughout the city.
"New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said of the removal of his city’s monuments:
"To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our more prominent places—in honor—is an inaccurate recitation of our full past, is an affront to our present and it is a bad prescription for our future.
"It may perhaps be enough to denounce the bulldozing of statues as an absurd erasure of history, but this is not the primary problem with this drive to wipe out uncomfortable elements of our past from the public sphere.
"The more critical issue at stake is the loss of a common purpose and the binding heritage that Americans of previous generations forged and shared.
"Dehumanizing the Past, Robbing the Present"While many on the political right have been fine, and in some cases glad, that Confederate heroes are being wiped from public places, they are deeply mistaken if they think this crusade will stop with secessionists.
"Most recently, “Antifa” protestors in Texas have demanded the removal of a 100-year-old statue and “any other landmark that bears the name of Sam Houston,” according to Conservative Review." . . .