The cancel culture judges America by her mistakes, not her strengths

As the nation watches the riots and criminal behavior that evolved from protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Black Lives Matter (BLM) has turned its attention to removing monuments to personalities from the Civil War that led to the end of slavery in the United States with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865.

But the mission to take down these monuments was confused from the beginning. It could have been a civil effort to have the “offending” items removed legally by petitioning the appropriate government agencies or property owners on which the statues reside, which is the proper way to do things. The statues could have been moved to museums or other places, if the proper authorities agreed with the petitioners.

But that wasn’t good enough for the cancel culture, which felt that the things must be removed now! And so, rioters — not protesters or demonstrators — turned their criminal behavior to destroying these historical items.

In addition to the monuments to southern Civil War personalities, they also blindly go after some who were on the same side of the slavery case as they are.

The statue of Ulysses S. Grant is one example. Grant was the 18^th President of the United States following the Civil War, from 1869 to 1877. But more illustrative of what a magnificent error it was to take down his statue, Grant was the Commanding General of the U.S. Army that defeated the hated Confederates — the targets of BLM — and won the Civil War, leading to emancipation of the slaves.

An even more astonishing mistake is the threatening to take down the Emancipation Memorial. Because this memorial features the likeness of Abraham Lincoln with a black man, Archer Alexander, in chains at his feet, it is regarded by the rioters as a symbol of slavery.

The former slave and now-famous American Frederick Douglass, however, predicted that members of his race “will think of [the Memorial] and speak of it with a sense of manly pride.”

Rather than being a passive, submissive slave, the Memorial was in fact designed to show Alexander at Lincoln’s feet exerting his own strength to break the chains that bound him.

Douglas said, “We have done a good for our race today. In doing honor to the memory of our friend and liberator [Lincoln], we have been doing highest honors to ourselves and those who come after us,” and “we may calmly point to the monument we have this day erected to the memory of Abraham Lincoln.”

And then there is Charlotte Scott, a former slave freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, who said upon hearing of Lincoln’s assassination, “the colored people have lost their best friend on earth! Mr. Lincoln was our best friend, and I will give five dollars of my wages towards erecting a monument to his memory.”

Her contribution sparked a movement among freed slaves to raise money for a memorial to Lincoln which totaled more than $12,000. At that time $12,000, and even $5, was a lot of money.

Female RE-Enactors of Distinction (FREED) is a group of actors that is committed to accurately depict the role of African Americans, including the U.S. Colored Troops and their families during the U.S. Civil War.

Marcia Cole is a member of FREED who portrays Charlotte Scott. Regarding the Memorial, she told Washington, DC TV station WJLA, “I’m here to speak on behalf of the legacy of Charlotte Scott. I understand there’s a big campaign trying to raise money to either take it down or mend it, and I say ‘no’ on behalf of Ms. Charlotte.” 

But the rioters don’t know this history.

So, the historical figures and sites that the BLM wants removed will not be decided by the American people and their governments, but by a relative handful of the people, who don’t know history and don’t care about history. They care nothing about what others think and willingly, eagerly, turn to criminality to accomplish their goal.

That isn’t the American way. But America and her ways are a foreign language to most of these folks. They judge America by her mistakes only, ignoring her strengths. They apply his same myopia to Civil War figures. They see only a part of the lives of the individuals that they target. That small part is all that matters to them.

That sentiment was fairly clearly stated by Hawk Newsome, president of the Greater New York Black Lives Matter. “If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it,” Newsome said in an interview on Fox News’ “The Story” with Martha MacCallum.

And so, what we really have is not merely a crusade by a relatively small group to cleanse the land and remove elements they dislike and that stain our history, it is to wreak havoc and impose their will on the rest of us.

In the wise words of Marcus Aurelius: “How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.”

Order must be restored, and those committing crimes must be held accountable.

Let’s not change what makes us uncomfortable. Let’s learn from it!

Change this! Get rid of that! America has a new mania where people try to remove statues and monuments they don’t like, that make them uncomfortable, or that they believe are bad. If a statue or a monument upsets people, it must be erased from the American landscape where it has existed for years or decades. 

In the process of soothing these feelings of discomfort, features of American history, some of them very important, will forever be removed to the trash pile, painted over, or stored in a warehouse somewhere, and lost to the generations that follow. 

These things can help future Americans learn about their country so that they will be able to understand its full history and evolution, both the best and the worst.

Instead of the full story of what built America, what will be left to future generations to learn from is whatever the existing culture deems important at the time. 

Some important elements in the history of the United States of America will be removed through this politically correct cleansing of America’s history, for no better reason than to soothe the discontented.

Included in the list of things from America’s past that have been targeted for removal from public view are: The Jefferson Memorial; Mount Rushmore; Stone Mountain; two Chicago Parks; and monuments and statues across the nation.

While the subject of some monuments may be a person or persons who may now be unpopular, the monument or statue itself may be a special achievement. 

Likewise, the people who are remembered and honored by prominent statues were not universally bad. The recent dislike of Thomas Jefferson, for example, is because he owned slaves. In fact, slavery is the reason for so much of today’s efforts to remove many statues and monuments.

Slavery is now universally condemned in the U.S., as it should be. And it is a dark period in the nation’s history. But for decades during slavery in the south, no one living at that time was alive when slavery did not exist in the southern states. Slavery wasn’t right, but it was the way things were; it was a regular part of life in the southern U.S.

The Jefferson Memorial honors America’s third president, and a Founder of our republic. Although Jefferson inherited slaves from his father and kept them throughout his lifetime, he also publicly denounced slavery. The totality of his life and work was not just being a slave owner. His work was critical to the formation of the country in which so many now are able to condemn him for owning slaves.

Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, which began the struggle for freedom from the binds of British dominance, he was a critical part of America’s formation, and he had served as the nation’s second vice president before being elected president.

Surely this man’s great contributions to the formation of the United States of America are enough to warrant his remaining a part of the story, and not being removed from our history.

It took some 400 workers from 1927 to 1941 to produce the majestic figures on the rock face in the Black Hills of South Dakota known as Mount Rushmore. Those four were Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. 

Rushmore is an amazing tribute to workmanship as well as a unique work of art. It depicts four of our most notable presidents, all of whom had their faults, as do we all. But they are forever a part of our history. 

The carving on Stone Mountain in Georgia has similar assets. It is the largest high relief sculpture in the world. The Confederate Memorial Carving depicts three figures of the Civil War, President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson. The carving is 400 feet above the ground, measures 90 by 190 feet, and is recessed 42 feet into the mountain.

Like Mount Rushmore it is a tribute to workmanship, is a work of art, and features people prominent in our history who are now being condemned. 

Chicago has parks named for George Washington and Andrew Jackson that are also targeted for change. Someone has suggested changing Jackson Park to honor either modern civil rights figure Jesse Jackson or singer Michael Jackson, and also renaming Washington Park. However, both Washington and Jackson contributed much to our Country, and deserve their rightful place in history.

And there are numerous monuments and statues in North Carolina, Virginia and in towns and cities all across the nation that also are targeted. Each of them represents some contribution to the rich history of what was and still is the greatest nation yet conceived.

People mostly aren’t looking at the big picture. Our country has made mistakes, as all countries do. Each of us can think of things we would prefer weren’t part of our history. But erasing history is foolish.

Future generations can only learn from our successes and our failures if they know what they are. The good and the bad together form our history, and nothing less than the whole story is acceptable to tell America’s story.

Should we sanitize America’s history, or not? That is the question

Reacting to the fairly new and growing trend to remove monuments and other reminders of certain famous Americans from the time of the American Revolution when our nation was born, former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice appeared on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” one morning last May to take issue with that movement. Newsmax.com reported that she said it is a “bad thing.”

She was asked about her recent book, "Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom," and about how she sees herself as a black woman in today’s United States.

Co-host Brian Kilmeade asked: "When we look at nine of our first 12 presidents as slave owners, should we start taking their statues down, saying we're embarrassed by you?" She answered that, no, we shouldn’t. "I'm a firm believer in keeping your history before you."

"I don't actually want to rename things that were named for slave owners," Rice continued. "I want us to look at the names and recognize what they did and be able to tell our kids what they did and for them to have a sense of their own history. When you start wiping out history, sanitizing history to make you feel better, it's a bad thing." History, properly told, presents the good, the bad and the ugly.

Providing an illuminating lesson about our history she noted that the Constitution originally counted black slaves as "three-fifths of a man," and then gave examples of how America has evolved since. "In 1952, my father had trouble registering to vote in Birmingham, Alabama," she said. "In 2005, I stood in the Ben Franklin room, [named after] one of our founders, and I took an oath of office to that same Constitution and it was administered by a Jewish woman Supreme Court justice. That is the story of America."

"They were the people of their times," Rice said, alluding to the fact that few if any alive at our country’s birth had ever lived at a time, or in a place that slavery was not reality. As bad as that was, it was the way things were.

In fact, Anthony Johnson, a black Angolan who achieved freedom in the early 17th-century Colony of Virginia after serving his term of indenture, became a property owner, and was one of the first slave owners in Virginia.

"I wish [all the Founders] had been like John Adams, who did not believe in slavery,” Rice continued. Another Founder who was not a slavery supporter was Benjamin Franklin, who in 1787 began serving as President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.

“I wish they had been like Alexander Hamilton, who was an immigrant by the way, a child of questionable parentage from the Caribbean. I wish all of them had been like that, Jefferson in particular. There were a lot of contradictions in Jefferson ... we should celebrate the Jeffersons, Washingtons, slave owners. Look where we are now."

America’s path from slavery, to freeing the slaves, to today’s circumstances has been long and often troubled. But today, we see people like Condi Rice who have risen to the heights of our country. America’s history of slavery and the long, difficult struggle to finally end it 150 years ago is also her history, and the history of most black Americans. The list of black Americans who have achieved great things is long, indeed, and includes people in government, such as Barack Obama, Loretta Lynch, Eric Holder, Ben Carson, Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, and more than 30 current members of Congress elected by their constituents to represent them.

In addition, there are also hundreds of black professional athletes – including those who feel led to take a knee in protest – as well as musicians, actors, entertainers, television personalities, and those in the professions.

Rice also noted that owning slaves was only one part of the lives of the Founders. So many things that these former slave owners did that were positive and contributed so much to our country are overlooked by their critics. Perhaps it’s because they are not aware of these beneficial acts, or maybe they simply believe no positive aspect of their lives is sufficient to overcome their involvement in slavery.

Today, people want to remove monuments recognizing our Founders, and sometimes take illegal, destructive actions against them, all because they owned slaves more than 200 years ago. Nothing else about them matters.

What needs to be done is to not tear down reminders of America’s history of slavery – which at the time existed not just in America, but all over the globe – but instead to learn about and celebrate America’s progress since that time.

Slavery is thousands of years old. Athenians had slaves as long ago as the sixth century BC. And it exists still. According to an article on BBC.com, “there are, shockingly, more people in slavery today than at any time in human history - but campaigners think the world is close to a tipping point and that slavery may be eradicated in the next 30 years.”

Wouldn’t a more productive use of these anti-slavery sentiments be to focus on ending slavery around the world?