It's the bane of good city planning: Discontinuing one street right in the middle of its course, or at least changing its name, and then restoring its name further on. It's the same street. Only the name has been changed, then changed back again. It's got to be confusing. Little wonder so many people get lost and have to ask for directions. ("I was on Confederate Boulevard a moment ago, but now I'm on Springer. Can you help me?")
No town can have enough straight streets on a simple, predictable grid, but Little Rock has entirely too many that suddenly take on an alias, then return to their original name, leaving any visitor bewildered. It gets even more confusing when the (brief) change of name gets all tangled up with old grievances made current politics. There's a name for it (waving the bloody shirt), a frequent practice back when the Civil War had been officially concluded--but the undeclared war between unreconstructed rebels and yankees bent on enforcing a vengeful peace on the South continued unabated.
That war after The War lives on in the rhetoric of one Anika Whitfield, who objects mightily to leaving any remnant of Confederate Boulevard on the municipal map. The lady could have stepped out of any reunion of the Grand Army of the Republic back in the late 19th Century, to judge by her overheated rhetoric:
"The Civil War was meant to divide the U.S. Anything that is divisional [maybe she means divisive], has a racist tone, promotes hate, promotes unjustifiable murders of innocent adults and children, it certainly is one we need to dispel, we need to erase, we need to eradicate from a living history. We need to recognize it as the ill it was in historical perspective and move forward to try to prevent any other ills of that nature."
Goodness. The lady could be Thaddeus Stevens delivering a stemwinder in the middle of Reconstruction--that is, waving the bloody shirt for all he was worth.
Couldn't we just try to make our city planning rational without indulging in all this completely unnecessary, even provocative, grandiloquence?
Or would that be unspeakably rational? As a Union general named Grant once wisely suggested, "Let us have peace."
Editorial on 07/08/2015