Other bad guys: Paul Revere, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson
Add to the list of bad guys this bad gal: Sen. Dianne Feinstein. She made the rank error of repairing a vandalized item in a historical display outside San Francisco’s City Hall. As appropriate punishment, Feinstein’s name was stripped from one of its public schools by the San Francisco Unified School District board.
Feinstein is in good company. Also stripped of their names were schools named after George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Webster, Paul Revere — and Abe Lincoln.
Feinstein’s punishment symbolized the crimes of the rest. Feinstein had a Confederate flag repaired. It was part of an historical exhibit. According to the contemporary thought police, history may not be remembered. Contradictions abound. The thought police want to strip a school of George Washington’s name because he owned slaves — slavery, one must remember. But a Confederate flag — that, one must not remember. Go figure.
As for slave ownership, no one today condones slave ownership. Also today, the thought police evince no knowledge of context. The Founding Fathers set the country on the way to the abolition of slavery by declaring all men to be created equal. That’s what made the critical difference. The Founding Fathers struggled with the contradiction of slave ownership in a way and to an extent that they set in motion its end.
There is no other way to understand the first decades of American history, during which, for example, the Northwest Territory — larger than the entire 13 colonies — was designated as free, i.e., non-slave territory. Then, the admission of many new states to the union triggered strenuous debates as to whether they should be free or slave.
Contrast this with the unself-aware actions of the current thought police. They are prepared to see the sins of others but not their own: not, for example, the violence they nurtured in many cities over the summer of 2020. They are prepared to condemn the January 6 attack on the Capitol in Washington, DC but not on federal buildings in Portland, Oregon. They are prepared to strip Marjorie Taylor Green of a seat on a Congressional committee, but not Ilhan Omar of her seat on the Foreign Relations Committee. Is Omar’s charge that AIPAC buys off US Congresspeople any less deluded or anti-Semitic than Taylor Green’s statements? Was Omar’s apology any less ambiguous? The thought police, their self-righteousness notwithstanding, are imperfect.
The Founding Fathers were imperfect men who set about creating a “more perfect” union; that is, who acknowledged the imperfections in their enterprise. Not so the imperfect fanatics who strip the names of American heroes from schools out of unawareness of their own, dangerous imperfections.
Context is critical. Those who would destroy the past out of ignorance or dismissal of context would create a future devoid of nuance, of free speech and of tolerance of anything other than their own ideology. This would undermine America.
It is not a small thing to strip schools of their heroic names. It is a sign of dangerous potential in the current political climate, in which one with a different opinion is not wrong, but wicked.
Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News
