Your jib … its cut … I like.
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Mr. Vela, might I suggest you read up on the history of Confederate Monuments…
…commemorative markers of the Civil War tended to be memorials that mourned soldiers who had died,…
… Eventually they started to build [Confederate] monuments,” he says. “The vast majority of them were built between the 1890s and 1950s, which matches up exactly with the era of Jim Crow segregation.”
… In contrast to the earlier memorials that mourned dead soldiers, these monuments tended to glorify leaders of the Confederacy…The values these monuments stood for, he says, included a “glorification of the cause of the Civil War.”
Why glorify the Civil War? (rhetorical)
IMHO, I think these confederate statues should be on museum grounds with moral and historical markings of context as a teaching tool and not for political or glorification purposes!
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I’m not missing it. I’m disagreeing that we should be leaving up statues to racists and bigots on public land.
When you do that, you’re telling a large swath of America that their views are less important than racists of a century ago.
It’s their land, too. It’s all of ours.
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“Vela said that he hopes visitors will “want to learn more and do further research” with this approach.”
If that is the plan, why take the passive stance. If someone is calling them on a monument being racist or some other evil, then that person is likely clued in to begin with at some level. But those who are not will not ask. Being proactive would be a better stance then. Address the dichotomies directly in the displays and monuments.
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That’s not all there was to Jackson.
These are not binary choices—history is a complicated thing, and the telling of it has been rife with elisions of uncomfortable facts.
Adding those facts and correcting the record doesn’t negate other accomplishments or narratives about the subject of the statuary.
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And you are castigating a federal employee who has no control of statues on city, county, or state land. There is a difference as @hagarwood points out.
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Either by law or by force, they are going to be pulled down, so get the fuck out of the way, asshole.
Little Big Horn National Battlefield is one of the best-interpreted parks in the country. The Indian Memorial that was added about 20 years ago is stunning - symbolizing “spirit warriors” rather than any particular individuals, but nonetheless represents the side that won that battle in the course of a war against genocide (https://www.nps.gov/libi/learn/historyculture/indian-memorial.htm).
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That’s quite the elaborate straw man you’ve got there.
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This isn’t nuanced. It’s a bunch of the same ‘we’ll lose our history if we don’t have these monuments’ bullshit just dressed up in language that appears more thoughtful. The basic assumption though is that taking them down erases history. FUCK THAT. Removing them stops paying tribute and honor to people who deserve historical disdain.
You want a compromise? Fine. Take down the existing monuments and replace them with statues of confederate generals surrendering.
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“Let’s talk about who put it up, why they put it up. The context, the lens that they used in putting it up, and then give you more information,” Vela said. “And then when you leave that visitor experience, you decide, visitor, what do you do with it?”
I don’t have a problem with this – as long as its within the context of it being taken down – or to explain to people why there is an empty pediment where a statue celebrating a scumbag once stood.
But unless this jerkwad is going to assign park rangers to force visitors to sit through lectures before being allowed to view these atrocities, they need to be taken down first.
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Where are the statues to Sojourner Truth? She saved so many lives.
Where is the statue of Rosa Parks?
Why does the public have to live with something the public is now ashamed of? The arguments all sound like well, we should honor slavery since we did it.
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I’m talking about him talking about stuff on federal land, which belongs to all of us.
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Confederates were slavers, tyrants, traitors, piss poor tacticians, abysmal strategists and losers. If the parks completely rewrite their interperative programming to make that crystal clear, then the director might begin to have a point.
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I think on a battlefield, which is where most of the monuments under the jurisdiction of the NPS are (those in town squares, city parks, etc. are not under the NPS, except for in DC) monuments that show the actual combatants are appropriate with the proper background information. Wars are stupid and it’s mostly the little guys who die on both sides.
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As a former park ranger who’s kept in touch with my colleagues since my last work day at Glacier National Park (Summer, 2016) my sense is that the education and interpretive arms of the park service have managed to resist politicization or being muzzled by the current administration. One of the last in-depth, multi day trainings I participated in was run by an independent group (the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience) about implementing programs that facilitated dialogue on difficult subjects like racism. It was a powerful and challenging training, that really pushed rangers to tackle subjects head on, while also giving space (although not justification) to all voices. The training was happening at sites across the country. One of the examples that we explored was a program in Richmond where visitors looked at the statues, including the confederate ones, downtown (some of which were recently taken down.) A lot of people have suggested that when confederate statues are taken down, they should be sent to museums where their history and role can be interpreted. While I don’t agree with this approach in all cases, based on my experience, if there was a “museum” that I trusted to interpret confederate monuments in a way that fully addresses their history, it would be the NPS.
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Sure. But does he need a statue in front of the WH, on one of the most prominent locations possible.
Put it in a museum, not saying it needs to be destroyed.
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Vela has a very good point, although my personal preference is to take the statues down.
But we should never forget that the statue was there, and why it was put there. We should put something to replace them that indeed reflects on the issues, that reminds us of our history, that gives light to so much that several generations would not teach but with dark references like the statues themselves.
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And I’m talking about the majority of statues that honor confederate generals are those that were erected during Jim Crow and segregation. And most of those statues are not on federal land.
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