Confederate statues should remain

Confederate+statues+should+remain

Alex Krukar, Co-Editor-in-Chief

Lately, protests have sparked a debate that has managed to further divide this country. In Charlottesville, North Carolina, a group of white supremacists staged a march. It is difficult to know what exactly what they were marching for, as reports range from wanting to continue the confederacy, to fighting for the rights of neo-Nazis.

Needless to say, whatever the group was marching for, it was not good at all. This march then took a turn for the worst when counter protesters arrived and violence erupted. One woman was killed by a car that drove into the crowd. The president condemned violence on both sides, which was wrong, because he was only supposed to condemn the side that the media didn’t like.

This event caused many people to take the side of anti-fa for once, because nobody wants to side with Nazis (nor should they). For those who are unaware, Anti-Fa is a group of who comes out of their parent’s basement’s to destroy things in the name of “anti-fascism.” The irony is they are actually practicing fascism by using violence against anyone who disagrees with them. However, many Americans, including myself, looked at the situation in terms of somebody asking you to pick a poison. You’d rather just not take a poison, instead of picking a side, both of which are bad. Most average Americans do not like anti-fa, but they sided with them in this one circumstance. Anti-fa finally had garnered a little support, but like everything else the left does, they botched it.

Just when people began to side with the protestors, they threw away any support they had gained by starting to destroy statues of the Confederacy. The name for this is vandalism. Now some people may ask, is it really that bad? Don’t these monuments represent a time in U.S. history when people were thought of as less because of the color of their skin? The answer to that second question is yes. I believe that Lawrence B. Jones III puts it best. “When you remove history, you set yourself up to repeat it.” These monuments signify that the United States fought a bloody war to END slavery. They serve as reminders to never revert back to that time, because we will have similar bloody consequences

Now, I have no stake in anything having to do with the confederacy. Both sides of my family did not immigrate to the United States until the 1920’s or later, and they all lived in the Northeast, so the confederate monuments do not mean much of anything to me, and you would never see me wave a Confederate flag.

But what does worry me is where the line is drawn. Are these people going to stop at confederate monuments, or are they going to start to go after the founding fathers statues too? Will the Washington monument eventually be torn down? And after that, they might as well just burn the constitution, because Washington helped make that. That’s how anti-fa thinks, and we are already seeing it, with the vandalism of the Lincoln memorial. Vandals most likely inspired by anti-fa thinking destroyed the monument of the man who issued the emancipation proclamation. The man who FREED the slaves. That right there shows that this has nothing to do with slavery or race, (if it was, then they would tear down Margret Sanger’s statue, who was a proud advocate of eugenics, but instead they worship her, since she founded one of the most despicable organizations on the planet, Planned Parenthood.) These people simply want to destroy American history.