I have been amazed in these days of Covid and Black Lives Matter of the rancor and revolution that is pulling down statues everywhere. If not toppled by crowds, they are removed by agencies, schools, governments and businesses in the hopes of being politically appropriate and correct.
I don’t disagree with many of these acts and certainly don’t follow the Drumpian logic, which claims figures of confederate traitors deserve to stand because they have some great historic value. They really flag wave for the worst of our human character and deserve removal. Still, I am sad for all the birds that may have found pleasant perch or a great place to crap on Jefferson Davis, now gone and leaving an empty pedestal.
I am more disturbed by the fact the pendulum has swung so far we are removing monuments of imperfect people who have done great deeds despite what may have been their profound faults. I recently saw a news event where some entity was removing a statue of Abraham Lincoln because part of the artist’s rendering included an African American on his knee beside Lincoln. There is no dispute the lives of slaves were miserable and oppressed. However, are we saying the man that made the Emancipation Proclamation and fought the monumental uphill battle to get to the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment through Congress is undeserving of heraldry? Was Lincoln a perfect man? No! Did he do all that could or should have been done to make amends for hundreds of years of slavery? No. What is worth statuary is the recognition he was a flawed man pushing his world to be better, to be more fair and equitable and begin to right an enormous blemish that continues to shame our nation.
Are we now to destroy the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Monument because these founding fathers, who gave us the start of freedom, were hypocrites at the same time they were visionaries. Isn’t there a reason to retain such things, if for nothing else than to jog our memories and remind us that progress comes through such men of imperfection.
I’m not certain this is a unique function of being American, but we seem to believe those who have statues and monuments are supposed to be perfect creatures without fault. That will never be the case. Even Black Lives Matter grew out of the wretched murder of George Floyd, a man trying to survive by passing off counterfeit currency. Should we bulldoze the makeshift monuments and murals created in his honor because he was imperfect or, instead, recognize his imperfections are part of what brought us to this astonishing moment in history.
I think there are reasonable ways to judge such exigencies. The philosopher Santayana said “those who do not remember their history are doomed to repeat it.” When our monuments are not made to real people with sometimes flawed history, where do we find our learning? How do we recognize that the marred among us can be agents of great change, not the “pure”. There are no pure.
Empty pedestals that once held historic markers give us a place setting for real conversation that accounts for both our faults and flights. Columbus didn’t discover the new world to bring measles and kill the indigenous. It was a horrible consequence of a pursuit to expand the world beyond its known boundaries. Would we prefer to have lived our lives in a much smaller world, bound by kings and princes. If we remove Columbus, do we eradicate a mechanism to engage in fuller conversation or merely eliminate a critical piece of history that challenges our collective conscience, by removing it from our collective conscious. Do we remove it because there are not similar statuary to the Tuskegee Airmen, York of Lewis and Clark fame or Cesar Chavez? Or do we do a better job creating monuments to greatness wherever it is found.
Empty pedestals didn’t just harbor perches or bird crap sites – some held monuments to a great human mystery – how sometimes people who do irreconcilable things can make our world better. Artists often talk about the vibrancy of color being enhanced by black. Aren’t we better for seeing the flashes of inspiration against the backdrop of human frailty? How do we encourage future grace without acknowledging it is born out of societal and human detritus? How do we stop making our trailblazers cartoons of purity and allow them stature within their flaws?
Monuments are often made of bronze. An alloy amalgamed from copper, tin, and other metals and can include arsenic and phosphorus. Maybe, they are made from marble, which can include clay, mica, quartz, pyrite, iron oxides and graphite. Nothing is pure about either substance and each has both light and dark elements that make them stronger. Our great moments grow from our imperfections, sometimes despite them. We gain strength from those elements. We are not lessened by them, unless we are unprepared or unwilling to learn from the divine and the dross. I believe it is those contrasts that provide us true measure-markers on which we must build our future.