It’s getting worse and worse and for me, closer to home. I’m speaking not only of the rioting, demonstrating and looting – all in the name of Black Lives Matter; I’m talking about the deliberate destruction of our history by the dismantling of historic monuments across the country.
It reminds me of the devastation I felt when I saw the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in Afghanistan. The carvings were destroyed “just because,” and I felt it like a knife to my heart. It was so unnecessary and so terribly destructive – but that is what the Taliban does, destroy history with which they disagree.
In much the same way, the South has gone mad with the removal of history – taking down statues of Confederate generals and others associated with the Civil War. The madness has crept into Washington, D.C., as Speaker Nancy Pelosi is using her clout to push for the removal of nearly a dozen statues of Confederate personas from the National Statuary Hall Collection. She said they “pay homage to hate, not heritage.”
She also, just days ago, ordered the removal of at least 4 paintings of former Confederates who had served as House speakers. She apparently just found out about them.
There is also an effort to remove buried Confederate soldiers from Arlington National Cemetery and the move to change the names of military bases named after Confederate generals is also in the works.
Across the capital city, varied statues and monuments have been targets of racist graffiti as have similar statuary across the country. Many cities have already removed many of the statues – some before and others after they were defaced.
What’s the point of all this? We are told it’s because we should not “honor” people who were traitors or people who enslaved minorities – whether blacks or Native Americans.
But what about history? Isn’t it bad enough that our schools have so bastardized the teaching of history that our children have NO sense of what happened in the past and why? Seeing what the people of the past looked like will not rot their brains and, in fact, might make them see history as something that really happened and really influences our lives today.
Here in Northern California, we’re having our share of all that. Thousands in the streets, mobs surging onto freeways stopping traffic, clogging and stopping traffic on our bridges. When police move in to stop this, people criticize them and demand, as area residents told the Walnut Creek City Council this week, “We need a non-police response.”
No one bothered to explain what police were supposed to do when a “peaceful protest” on May 30 changed as more than 600 people swarmed through a shopping area in downtown, to quote the local news report, “looting about 40 businesses, including anchor stores like Macy’s, Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus.”
Northern California is also having our share of “statue removal.” Christopher Columbus is the current “big” target. It was announced this week that the statue of Queen Isabella and Christopher Columbus will be removed from the Capitol Rotunda in Sacramento. It has been there for more than a hundred years – since 1883. But no matter.
According to an official statement, “Christopher Columbus is a deeply polarizing historical figure given the deadly impact his arrival in this hemisphere had on indigenous populations.” They said, that the presence of the “deeply polarizing historical figure is completely out of place today.
“It will be removed.”
Another historic statue of the explorer has been removed – this one from Coit Tower in San Francisco, a week after it was defaced with red paint. The decision to remove the statue and put it in storage was made by Mayor London Breed and local elected legislators.
They will also decide what replacement there might be.
It should be noted that Columbus Day is still a federal holiday, but individual states can choose whether or not to recognize it and how. They can also decide whether to have schools recognize the holiday.
In 2018, October was named Italian American Heritage Month – mainly as a way to pacify Italian-Americans who were not happy about the destruction of the legacy of Christopher Columbus. They themselves faced xenophobia and prejudice when they arrived in this country, including a mass lynching in 1891 in New Orleans. For them, Columbus was an important symbol in their heritage.
Another hit to California history came this week when a statue of John Sutter was removed from the Sutter Medical Center in Sacramento.
Sutter, an immigrant citizen of the United States and Mexico, settled Sutters Mill, which became Sacramento, and then discovered gold! It was the gold rush that changed the face of California.
But rumor had it that he mistreated Native Americans on his properties, so now we have to get rid of him.
Another person we are being pushed to get rid of is Sir Francis Drake. In fact, the explorer arrived in present-day Northern California on June 17, 1579. He called it New Albion, claiming English sovereignty.
The area today is Marin County, just over the Golden Gate Bridge. There is a main road named after Drake, as well as a statue of an explorer, a bay, a high school and even a hotel in San Francisco named after him that has been there for 92 years.
Yet, activists are demanding that Drake’s name be removed from everything, because, they say, he was a slave trader and participated in the genocide of Native Americans.
What’s next? I can hardly wait, but I have no doubt that this trail of destruction will continue until virtually all of our history is either distorted or gone – because that is exactly the goal of Antifa and their communist followers.
If they are not firmly resisted, we really do stand to lose our country – and I for one, do not accept that.
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