It has become chic to be righteously indignant about the past

[rodheadlee]

I guess part of my problem was listening to this guy on NPR radio get all worked up over something that happened five hundred years ago. It sounded phony to me. Like he was auditioning for a part in a movie. 

[The Nehor]

I admit I was sad when they pulled down that confederate statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

I mean, look at it:

Perfectly captures how tacky and absurd the whole Confederacy was.

 

[The Nehor]

Also there is a difference between commemoration like a statue which is usually used to honor the person depicted and memory. We don’t ban pictures of Hitler or a plaque talking about World War Two but if someone put up a statue of Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin in front of a town hall we would justifiably wonder “what the hell” is going on in that town. It is the same with things like the Confederacy.

There is a strain in this that seeks utter purity and won’t find it. We do owe debts to people whose views we would find detestable if encountered by us today as we are standing on the shoulders of those giants who defied many of the evils of their day even if they did not defy all of them. I suspect our descendants will do the same to us. The things that scandalize them won’t be the divisions we have. It will be the accepted stuff virtually no one disagrees on that is revealed to have evils in it. Every generation has their pet virtues and vices. It was reading an old book about virtues that I first realized how cretinous the people of that day would find my generation. And if God exalts all the virtues….oh boy…it is going to take a lot to wash off the blood and sins of this generation and (incidentally) of every generation.

Very difficult task to redeem this world. Hope someone can figure out how to do it. On an unrelated note: MERRY CHRISTMAS!

[The Nehor]

In less fun statue news the Chinese government, under cover of night and while students were largely gone, disassembled and hauled away the University’s Tiananmen Square Massacre memorial statue, one of the few remaining on Chinese soil.

The University doesn’t own the statue. The artist who created it basically lent it to them so I guess that person can sue for damages……

 

…lol…..nope, I could not keep a straight face.