Posted on 08/14/2017 3:08:29 PM PDT by NKP_Vet
Several Brooklyn Democrat activists are smarting this week after a firm rebuke from the U.S. Army. The activists, who include Congresswoman Yvette Clarke and (sigh) the Rev. Al Sharpton, demanded that the Army rename two Brooklyn streets that are named after generals in the Confederate military. But General Lee Avenue and Stonewall Jackson Drive won’t be changing their names anytime soon because the Army has rejected their requests for, cough cough, social justice.
Those streets at Fort Hamilton, said the Army in their letter, are named after men who are “an inextricable part of our military history.” As such, they will continue to be memorialized, no matter how bent of out shape it makes a handful of politicians with nothing better to do with their time.
“After over a century, any effort to rename memorializations on Fort Hamilton would be controversial and divisive,” Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff Diane Randon said in the letter. “This is contrary to the Nation’s original intent in naming these streets, which was the spirit of reconciliation.”
Both Lee and Jackson, of course, were proud members of the U.S. military decades before the Civil War. In their time as leaders in the “Union,” as it were, they both served at Fort Hamilton at various points in their careers.
Clarke was unhappy about the response, telling the New York Daily News that the fight was not over. These monuments are deeply offensive to the hundreds of thousands of Brooklyn residents and members of the armed forces stationed at Fort Hamilton whose ancestors Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson fought to hold in slavery,” she said. “For too many years, the United States has refused to reckon with that history.”
Please. Sometimes it feels like the United States does nothing OTHER than “reckon with that history.” Is Clarke serious? Nothing else in our national past gets as much attention as the enslavement of blacks. We’re certainly not suggesting that this is an era of our history we should cover up or strive to forget, but let’s get real. The idea that we’re somehow trying to whitewash that history just doesn’t pass the smell test.
Besides, that has nothing to do with what’s going on here. These memorials are not suddenly “deeply offensive” to anyone. They are the left’s newest cause celebre – a rallying point around which they can create a problem where none exists. It’s so much easier to build a “problem” out of straw and then knock it down than it is to actually address the issues facing the American people here and now, in the present moment. And we’re sure it makes for a great donation strategy as well.
These activists have plenty of sway when it comes to Democratic-run city councils in New Orleans and corporate stores like Amazon…but they don’t have any when it comes to the U.S. military. So we’ll enjoy this little smackdown of political correctness for the time being, even if we know that, like Clarke herself said, the fight is not over.
Statues and monuments are a pretty lousy way to tell history regardless of who erects them.
I lived in DC for years, and my favorite monument was always the Jefferson Memorial. It’s the one monument I would actually visit on my own without out of town guests.
And I had a complicated relationship with it as my views on Jefferson evolved over my life.
(If anything, Jefferson is currently on an upswing with me because I tend to always react negatively to cultural sea changes, and Hamilton has really knocked Jefferson’s stock down in the general culture).
It is good to know that there is still some common sense in our military.
Interesting. I was a big fan of Jefferson's back in high school, but got interested in Hamilton later because he was underrated and under-appreciated while Jefferson seemed to get away with murder. Given all that's been going on, I may have to rethink that now.
The Founders are just fascinating people. George Washington really did and does seem like what we can be when we listen to our better angels.
Hamilton and Jefferson are basically our ever present political reality.
John Adams is where our best hopes meet our actual selves.
This is a really bad extended metaphor.
It did seem like Jefferson got away with murder for hundreds of years because he was such a beautiful writer and had such an amazing intellect. He was a romantic hero. And if owned slaves, oh well, so did Washington and a lot of the rest of them.
Hamilton was brilliant but was unlikable and a street fighter and straight up got murdered by a political rival.
So, some corrections were in order. But, now I feel like the pendulum is swinging too far in the other direction. We need some romanticism in our political life again.
Exactly. I’ve said the very same thing here many times.
No . Southern tradition and culture — wonderful history and honor. YANKEE!!
The “Rev’’ Sharpton doesn’t even know there is a West Point.
I'm of the opinion it happened because we allowed the commies to take over our schools and universities... We have allowed them to brain wash our kids starting at a very young age.. In some states the kids go to the government school as young as four years old. The welfare Mommy's don't want to take care of the kids they get PAID for having... That's why they always ALWAYS vote for the dimocraps.....
MHO......
A ‘tradition’ of importing labor by force because you were too cheap to pay your fellow white man and treating human beings like animals, PECKERWOOD!!!
yankee jack ass
Moonshine addled slave-empire-fantasizing bumpkin.
I almost wish you lot would actually try a second Civil War so that we could finish what Sherman couldn’t. It took damn near 100 years just to put down your little bedsheet-wearing goon squad that liked to burn churches and schools.
But your survival instincts are too strong for that, so here we sit: one side just smart enough to not start anything that will end in them getting outright flattened, the other side not wanting to cause the inevitable civilian and infrastructural collateral damage if it can possibly be avoided.
yankee dog.
Did you two decide to join FR at the same time just to piss all over the place or do we have a sock puppet in our midst?
Kim Jon, is that you ?
The only slavery present day blacks know is welfare slavery.
Democrats of old used their own money to buy slaves. Present day Democrats use taxpayer money to buy their slaves.
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