IT NEVER HAPPENED

From a carpenter’s toolbox of words and phrases: “When you fix a mistake it will seem to everyone who sees it from that time on that the mistake never happened!” Say you bought a house which had a stairway that was too steep. At considerable trouble and expense, you ripped out the steps and built a new stairway much easier to use. The next owner will never know that there was ever a problem in the first place. No matter how noble the intent, no matter how ingenious the repair, no matter how much work it took, no matter how much it cost, succeeding generations will never know about it.

Now we have people trying to fix America’s past. Their “fix” is to wipe out all reminders of the mistakes this country made hundreds of years ago. They propose to remove monuments, statues, plaques, and memorials that speak of dark times in our history. If they succeed, the irony will be that the loss of these symbols will be a defeat, not a victory. These are the unintended consequences of tearing down monuments, or “sanitizing history” as Condoleezza Rice calls it.

Tearing down monuments erases history.
Tearing down monuments is pretending that some things never happened.
Tearing down monuments denies knowledge to future citizens.
Tearing down monuments prevents valuable lessons from being taught.
Tearing down monuments is empty symbolism.
Tearing down monuments promotes ignorance.
Tearing down monuments destroys meaning.
Tearing down monuments manipulates culture.
Tearing down monuments opens the door for future resurgence.
Tearing down monuments expresses hatred, not love.
Tearing down monuments rejects healing of the past.
Tearing down monuments desecrates property not owned by the vandals.
Tearing down monuments is an attempt to reshape and revise the past.
Tearing down monuments is a self-defeating enterprise.
Tearing down monuments is a self-exalting exercise.
Tearing down monuments is virtue-signaling.
Tearing down monuments is misplaced anger.
Tearing down monuments is mob action.

A revisionist’s history is a lie. The truth is that America made colossal mistakes, egregious sins and inexcusable decisions. We have never tried to hide that since 1776 or especially since 1865. In the case of the Civil War, 600,000 Americans lost their lives which amounted to almost two percent of the population. Today, that would be over seven million people! The “mistake” that this represents is far too big to be wiped out and covered over.

It is too important for anyone to suggest that it never happened.