I have no connection to the South — I was born in California and raised in a variety of places in the West and Midwest ranging from the Marshall Islands to North Dakota to Kansas. To me, statues of Confederate soldiers hold no emotional value one way or the other — they are just a historical curiosity to me. And, as one keenly interested in history and the remnants and markers of history, I draw concern over knocking down and removing statues willy-nilly. I find it somewhat analogous to the Taliban blowing up the Buddha statues in Bamiyan. I’m not a Buddhist and had no connection to the statues, but those were pieces of history that now the world can never get back. And there are other groups around the world (e.g. ISIS) that seem hell-bent on destroying historical artifacts. We should not join them.

Ultimately, for me it is hard to fathom how one can be offended by a statue to the point that one wants to destroy it. I just can’t understand how a statue of some long dead person can incite a violent emotional response in a living person. To the extent that such statues create a rallying point for extremists, worry about and deal with the living extremists, not the inanimate object. If you remove the inanimate object, the extremists will find something else to rally around. They are the problem, not the statue.

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