Everything is so big when you are small. I remember downtown Louisville as a child growing up in the early sixties and living near the Watterson Expressway. So many landmarks that we passed by are gone now but live on in my memory and one of them was over one hundred and twenty years old. A seventy foot tall Confederate monument near the University of Louisville that stood for generations became an embarrassment to the minority, so it had to be moved somewhere less offensive. I drove by there a week ago and mourned our loss of history. It has a new home for now, in Brandenburg along its river front thanks to Louisville activist groups. For now….

Shame on Louisville.

Over the weekend we lost another monument, this time in New Orleans. A statue of General Robert E. Lee was removed by men wearing masks and protective vests from its home of one hundred and thirty three years. I suppose that an effort will now be made to rename the location where He stood…. Lee Circle.

This is going on all over the south, as we rewrite history to our liking, and with over seven hundred monuments still out there on public property, there is no end in sight. I have seen monuments pulled down before, but aren’t we different here? Don’t they behave this way in dictatorships? Am I the only one who is wondering what will be offensive to a loud vocal minority one hundred and fifty years from now? Or maybe twenty years from now?

What if it isn’t just monuments we are destroying? Open your eyes. What happens when any small loud vocal group with a chip on its shoulder decides that a president must go? Or a party? Or any other absurd thing that I can think of… and please remember that the removal of monuments of  the losing side of the civil war would have seemed absurd on the day they were erected. A very good lesson for us all maybe,don’t you think?

And if you disagree, please remember that someday you may be the one shouted down. Then what will your opinion be? We live in a world now where facts just can’t be trusted. We are evolving facts to mold thought, and changing history in the process . It is happening every day. There are two books that I wish were mandatory in high school and one of them has been on my mind lately.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten,every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered, and the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right.

George Orwell’s 1984.

Call me a heretic but the party is not always right, and two plus two always equals four.

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