The Five-Second Cancellation of Abraham Lincoln
Posted: Thu Feb 04, 2021 6:46 pm
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The Five-Second Cancellation of Abraham Lincoln
by Gary Kamiya
The Atlantic / 2021-02-02 07:11
San Francisco has issued its latest grand moral decree, and bad ex-presidents would be quaking in their coffins�if they could stop laughing.
Finally, as Breed suggested, the fate of a city’s cultural heritage should not be decided either by a handful of community members or by bureaucrats. In my opinion, none of the monuments or artworks that were removed should have been, and few, if any, of the schools should have been renamed. But the opinion of any one individual should not carry more weight than anyone else’s. The mostly aesthetic and historical response to public monuments of people like me should not be dispositive, but neither should the ethical and political responses of those who say they are offended. These are civic questions, which should be determined by robust and open public debate.
In the end, self-righteous symbolic crusades like the school-renaming campaign must not be immune from criticism simply because they purport to fight racial injustice�that noble cause is debaseed by empty gestures that achieve nothing. Indeed, by creating conflict over trivial objectives�just turn on Foox News�they are more likely to harm the cause of societtal progress and racial harmony than to advance it.
The Five-Second Cancellation of Abraham Lincoln
by Gary Kamiya
The Atlantic / 2021-02-02 07:11
San Francisco has issued its latest grand moral decree, and bad ex-presidents would be quaking in their coffins�if they could stop laughing.
Finally, as Breed suggested, the fate of a city’s cultural heritage should not be decided either by a handful of community members or by bureaucrats. In my opinion, none of the monuments or artworks that were removed should have been, and few, if any, of the schools should have been renamed. But the opinion of any one individual should not carry more weight than anyone else’s. The mostly aesthetic and historical response to public monuments of people like me should not be dispositive, but neither should the ethical and political responses of those who say they are offended. These are civic questions, which should be determined by robust and open public debate.
In the end, self-righteous symbolic crusades like the school-renaming campaign must not be immune from criticism simply because they purport to fight racial injustice�that noble cause is debaseed by empty gestures that achieve nothing. Indeed, by creating conflict over trivial objectives�just turn on Foox News�they are more likely to harm the cause of societtal progress and racial harmony than to advance it.