The Pendulum Snaps Back and Smashes Their Overton Window
Is a Monument Removal Reversal Loading?
Is a Monument Removal Reversal Loading?
(Randy Young, Thomasville Times-Enterprise) - I am an American history zealot. I find it more than interesting. The story of our nation is all at once fascinating and inspiring, while at the same time convoluted and complicated.
You know, kind of like each of us.
While each element described there is accurate and true, it is all of that and more that is precisely what makes me so fascinated by and interested in our collective story. In other words, just like us, it’s complicated.
That’s why, when the movement started some years back to remove certain historical monuments connected to some of the more complex parts of our story, I spoke out strongly against it. Personally, I see any effort to shroud any part of our history as a mistake. To fully appreciate and understand exactly who and what we are, you have to have some understanding and appreciation of all sides of our story, the good, the bad, and the ugly. It all combines to tell the story of “us.”
Many great monuments and things of their nature were essentially canceled, erased, torn down, and removed from places where some of them had been located for 150 or more years. In doing so, we willingly created literal gaps in the timeline of who and what we are as a nation.
But – I don’t know if you have noticed or not, there has been a recent undercurrent seeking the return of some of those monuments.
One such example is taking place in South Carolina regarding the huge monument to John C. Calhoun. One of the more complicated figures in American history, Calhoun was a prominent fire-eating South Carolina politician from the…