NY town offers to take NYC’s unwanted statues: ‘People want to forget history’
Brookhaven Town Supervisor Ed Romaine explains why he is offering to take statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Christopher Columbus, saying people should not apply today’s standards to historical figures.
The illiberal wokesters in New York’s City Council are at it again, this time absurdly threatening the removal of statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, among others.
Obviously, their destructive lunacy must be stopped, but frankly, it's not enough. We must demand that the statues felled amidst the madness of 2020 be restored to their rightful places.
Take the iconic Teddy Roosevelt statue ripped from the entrance of a Museum of Natural History that he made great, or the statue of Abraham Lincoln in Boston, modeled on the original in Washington, D.C., that was commissioned and paid for by none other than freed slaves.
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It's time to bring them back.
Workers remove part of a statue of Theodore Roosevelt on January 20, 2022. It has stood outside the entrance to the New York City American Museum of Natural History since 1940. (REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs)
Or how about the canceled statue of Christopher Columbus in, you guessed it, Columbus, Ohio? Does it make the slightest bit of sense to any sane person that the explorer can’t have a statue but the whole town is named after him?
The year of our Lord 2020 was like a dinner party gone out of control, with china smashed and upholstery destroyed in the fevered mayhem of COVID-19 and George Floyd riots.
Now, as we awaken from the stupor, albeit with one hell of a hangover, it is time to make amends and fix what was broken, that is what responsible people do.
It is not always or even very often that grave mistakes made by our society can be swiftly redressed, usually choices already acted upon become tangled.
Pulling back the excesses of the trans or Me-Too movement, minimizing the impact of critical race theory in our schools, these are complicated, multifaceted projects, but restoring the statues is not.
Just go get them and bring them back, we could do it tomorrow.
Not only is the restoration of these marvelous monuments to our shared history the right thing to do, it will also send a powerful message to those who continue their assault on our culture.
Progressives earnestly believe that any social goal they achieve is irreversible, that the ratchet only goes in one direction. And that has been mostly true, from welfare to crime to education and the border, even when the results are demonstrably terrible.
In this June 25, 2020, file photo, a statue that depicts a freed slave kneeling at President Abraham Lincoln's feet rests on a pedestal in Boston. On Tuesday, Dec. 29, the statue was removed from its perch. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
In their Hegelian, Marx-addled minds, the left truly believes that the arc of history bends solely and irrevocably to their whims. That must be proven wrong.
By returning the equestrian Teddy Roosevelt’s steady gaze over Central Park we will celebrate not only him and his achievements, but the statue will take on even more meaning as a monument to our restored sanity.
Everybody knows that the damnation of the memory of legitimate American heroes like Roosevelt and Washington is an act of cultural suicide.
We know this because prior to 2020, when conservatives, including then-President Donald Trump, expressed concern that removing Confederate statues would slide down the slippery slope to sidelining Washington and Jefferson we were called crazy.
Pulling back the excesses of the trans or Me-Too movement, minimizing the impact of critical race theory in our schools, these are complicated, multifaceted projects, but restoring the statues is not. Just go get them and bring them back, we could do it tomorrow.
In 2017 this headline from NBC News chided Trump: "Statues of Washington, Jefferson Aren't 'Next,' But It's Complicated, Historians Say."
Turns out they were next, and in very short order.
A naive historian named Kevin Levin is quoted in the article saying, "We can acknowledge they were flawed men and were slaveholders, but, they founded this nation — an imperfect nation."
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These were wise words, but that’s not how the protesters looked at it. Lincoln was the Great Emancipator and Roosevelt was the savior of our public lands. They still tore down their statues in their zealous rage.
Even worse than the removal of the statues was the fact that it was done with so little input from the American people. There were no referendums, instead the elites, be they politicians, museum boards of directors, and even universities, made the decisions for us.
Let's give Washington and Jefferson one more election, Roosevelt and Lincoln never shied away from political fights, give the American people another chance to vote for their vision of a great nation rightfully proud of its accomplishments.
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A just and great society is not the one that makes no mistakes, such perfection does not exist, rather, it is the society that recognizes and corrects its mistakes, constantly restoring its course, not to a predestined arc of history, but to the choices of free men.
It’s time to bring the statues back, not just for ourselves, not just for the men and women who crafted them, not just for the heroes they celebrate, but for posterity, for our children, who deserve to ponder the greatness of a society which they will soon inherit.
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