Americans are slipping into a social and political whirlpool. Crowds rush about with ropes and paint to pass judgment on our history with no apparent idea of its complexities. Government, corporate America, entertainment and the academy have followed along with unseemly ease. And under it all, free speech has become socially perilous if it does not conform to the trends of the moment. This tyranny of mindlessness, unchecked, promises to drown all human rights as it did in the French Revolution.
The French Revolution began with "liberty, equality, fraternity" and ended with the Terror as the mob indiscriminately guillotined. Now the Black Lives Matter revolution is beginning to adopt the chant "toxic, racist, colonialist" while invoking an intellectual "Terror" even to the toppling of statues of Thomas Jefferson and Christopher Columbus. Elsewhere Washington, Ulysses Grant and numerous other historically impure actors are toppled. This parallel should alert us to the mischief potential of mob-thought.
We have never been a perfect people. Nor have we ever been an especially evil people as trendy revisionist historians assert. What makes us unique is our commitment and dedication to the process of obtaining liberty and justice for all. Jefferson said it, Abraham Lincoln said it, and our constitutional amendments say it. The essential thing is the process, and it defines American exceptionalism set in motion by the framers.
Good people of courage everywhere need to discard the slogans of the moment, call out the taint of the mob for what it is and have a meaningful conversation on the history and ideals of the American political process. The action that follows would certainly reflect more wisdom and efficacy than President Donald Trump's tweets or the mob's rampaging.
Louis Lavoie, Plymouth
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In conversations about race in America, the voices of white supremacy have sometimes used bullhorns and sometimes used dog whistles. Concerning the debate about removal of Confederate monuments and renaming military bases, the subtlety of dog whistles has been abandoned and the bullhorns are blaring. Those who decry renaming these bases and decommissioning these monuments as attempts to "erase our history" and "defame our heroes" are quite clearly not speaking to all of us. And they quite clearly do not care.
Most of the monuments at issue were erected between 1890 and 1950 and many of the military bases named in the World War II era. It was the era of Jim Crow and in many cases the decisions to honor leaders of the Confederacy, who seceded from the Union in order to preserve and expand the institution of slavery, were openly acknowledged to have been made in furtherance of white supremacist ideology. In any event, with no exception of which I am aware, the Confederate "heroes" were not honored despite their support for the institution of slavery but because of it. Treason to the United States was not, for these men, a blot on their records but their principal claim to fame.
