My dear John, your post is interesting and obviously heartfelt.
However. You knew this was coming, right?
My blood relatives, a number of whom would possibly be alive today, were lined up at the edge of a ditch in a small Polish village, one they had been forced to dig, and machine gunned to death. Babes in arms, pregnant women, grandfathers, toddlers, all killed because they were Jewish. No one is forgetting that past. NO ONE.
I would see a memorial erected at the site, but that memorial will NOT be of Hitler, nor any Nazi that ever was. Why should the perpetrators of such an unspeakably evil period of history be glorified via statuary?
I always think of the picture on my grandmother’s piano of those people. A statue made in that likeness would be nice. Perhaps one of a child, running with a dog, and laughing. An elderly woman, sitting with her grandchildren, reading a book.
Anything but the subhumans who caused them to die.
So, why glorify the generals and others who fought to leave the United States? Who were bent on preserving the idea of actual human beings as property, to be used, abused, and cast aside when no longer productive?
Replace them with statues of people who ran the Underground Railroad. The heroic figures of history that we don’t even know, the ones who fought, and died, to free their fellow humans? Why not them, instead?
We will never forget our shameful past, and we will remember, with or without statues. So why not remove the statues that glorify the evil, and replace with those that glorify the people who suffered, or the heroes who did what they could to help?
Banning the movie is stupid, I’ll agree with that. It’s a movie, based on a book, based loosely on current events at that time, with actors who went home after the day’s filming. I personally thought the movie too long, and too overdone for my tastes. I equate that with people not saying ‘Merry Christmas’ because atheist ethnic Jews like me might get offended. It’s just words. They don’t affect me, because I choose to not let them. As my dad, who served 6 tours in Vietnam said during the 4th of July fireworks, ‘I know the difference between being on a carrier in the South China Sea and being strafed by the enemy, and sitting in a chair, with a beer, watching fireworks on the Fourth’.
Get rid of the statues. Replace with non evil doers. It really IS that simple.
Peace in, brothah John…
