Lately it seems Americans have decided that we must try to erase the recognition of anyone who at any time was involved in any of what we consider today as an evil aspect of history.
We seem to be striving to remove the names and statues of people based on any association with standards that today we consider unacceptable. We are using that scale to decide whether a person deserves to be remembered, while conveniently ignoring the rest of their accomplishments. We are trying to remove the names and memories of anyone or anything connected to or remotely involved in the treatment of various ethnic groups.
It all started with removing Confederate monuments and spread to Confederate statues. Then it turned to local schools and colleges named for those who, according to modern standards, were on what's now considered the wrong side of history at some point of their lives.
Now it's affecting street signs, buildings, college dorms, dining halls, and mascots of athletic teams.
How about the settlers who came over on the Mayflower? They didn't arrive to find a vast uninhabited wilderness. North America was inhabited by an estimated 15 to 20 million indigenous people, and during the next 250 years their land was taken from them; those who weren't killed or didn't die from disease brought over by the Europeans were put on reservations.
We seem to ignore most of those atrocities, because trying to erase them would require the removal of thousands more names and statues that had anything to do with them. Almost all of our country's former citizens were part of the abusive treatment of these people. And we think that stopping use of the name "Redskins" is a way to reconcile history? Who are we kidding?
This country has a checkered past, and slavery was part of it. Slavery is detestable, but many of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. I guess the name-changers want to hunt down all the streets, buildings, and memorials that honor them and change their names too?
The list keeps growing. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are coming into play, since slavery is connected to Washington, and mistreatment of American Indians is being pinned on Lincoln. Are we going to change the names of, say, Lee County in Arkansas, or the state of Washington?
Eleven Southern states joined to form the Confederacy, and civil war resulted. Nearly every able-bodied white man in the South between the ages of 17 and 70 participated in some way in the insurrection. After the war, some of these men contributed greatly to thousands of admirable causes such as the building of colleges and schools. Are we going to remove every name that has any tie to slavery or the treatment of indigenous peoples? If so, we conveniently ignore the sins of the present.
It seems we are grading sin: putting some sins of the past on a list and forgetting others, especially sins of the present. That puts us on a slippery slope. Who is to judge which sins are especially grievous, and which are simply the price our country paid for progress as a nation?
We justify renaming a grade school that had been named after someone who at one time was part of something that--while commonplace in that person's lifetime--is today considered a black mark on his or her character.
We have a thumb on the scales of justice when we judge William Fulbright. We point to his political stance at a time in history, and ignore his accomplishments.
We are doing the same thing with Lincoln, Washington, and Andrew Jackson. If you examine almost all historical figures back to Columbus, we can easily find fault, based on today's standards of conduct, with every one of them. Columbus has come under fire and his statue has been defaced because of his treatment of indigenous people. Are we ready to start renaming Columbus towns?
It seems we are proclaiming a self-righteousness which ignores the sins of the present and condemns the sins of the past. We believe it's OK to spend millions of dollars to rename streets and schools and remove monuments because of the involvement of that person in a practice we find abhorrent today, without any regard to the full measure of that person's life.
We conveniently ignore the continued discrimination against women, who certainly don't have equal rights. We protest the insignificant name of a school and ignore the homeless, allow a terrible percentage of our population to suffer from inadequate housing, and let children go hungry while we push to take down a meaningless sign.
It is time to put history back in the books. It is impossible for us to reconstruct the lives of these men and women who we condemn today without a thorough investigation of their lives, and that is what we are doing today as we nitpick a stand these people took or a cause they supported.
The pharaohs of Egypt were guilty of chiseling out the names of former pharaohs. Isn't that what we are doing today when we change the name of Jackson Street to Porcupine Avenue?
Email Richard Mason at richard@gibraltarenergy.com.