> ° By the End of Summer, There Will Not be a Christopher Columbus Statue Left Standing on the Continent He Discovered

https://twitter.com/DeAnna4Congress/sta … wsrc%5Etfw [Questionable Source]

I suppose by the end of the summer, there won’t be a single statue of the man who discovered this continent left standing on it, save perhaps the one in Mexico City.

This is actually heart-breaking.


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https://apnews.com/f4a689a39daf6a1b8b7e4f503d26c2aa

Baltimore protesters pulled down a statue of Christopher Columbus and threw it into the city’s Inner Harbor on Saturday night.
Demonstrators used ropes to topple the monument near the Little Italy neighborhood, news outlets reported.
Protesters mobilized by the death of George Floyd at the hands of police have called for the removal of statues of Columbus, Confederate figures and others. They say the Italian explorer is responsible for the genocide and exploitation of native peoples in the Americas.
According to The Baltimore Sun, the statue was owned by the city and dedicated in 1984 by former Mayor William Donald Schaefer and President Ronald Reagan.
A spokesman for Baltimore Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young told The Sun the toppling of the statue is a part of a national and global reexamination over monuments “that may represent different things to different people.”
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Sure.

A mob of rioters that pulled down a historic monument and threw it in the river on the Fourth of July were just part of a reexamination of meaning.

Okay.

If the core symbols of our culture mean vastly different things to different people, to the point where one side thinks they’re great and a core part of their identity and the other side thinks they’re pure evil and have to be violently ripped down by a mob in the middle of the night, then we no longer live in a society.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the man since the mayor announced he is tearing down the statue at city hall and destroying other symbols of the great Italian explorer. I am really able to appreciate the role that Christopher Columbus played in the culture that I grew up in. He was a truly inspirational figure, who anyone should be able to look toward and say, “I should try to be as dedicated to my own endeavors as he was to his.”

It is deeply saddening to me that there are millennials who grew up with this same Columbus imagery that I grew up with who are now attacking him. When I see that, I understand that this goes beyond politics, and that these people are deeply damaged individuals.

We should remember that these monuments we build to great men are to commemorate the men as individuals, but they are also to commemorate all of those who served to create whatever time period they lived in. However, these people are dead, so the real reason we build them is for ourselves. The lionizing of great men makes us want to be better versions of ourselves, as we are reminded that the world will still be here 500 years after we die, and we only have this short period to make our mark on it. They also serve to remind us that we do not exist in a void, for our bloodlines stretch back through the ages. We are links in an unbroken chain that leads to Adam and Eve. It is from this past that our identity originates, and we too play a role in shaping the identities of future generations. There is in life such a thing as duty and if we sever our connection to the past, we are depriving future generations of something that by rights is theirs as much as it is ours.

If people cannot agree on something so basic an idea as “our cultural identity and the heroes that represent it are above reproach,” there is no possible way they could be considered something other than subversive elements, and evil.