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When a child looks at a statue of Robert ELee and asks “mama who is that” a mother has a chance to tell a child about a war that freed the slaves. How a country split in two and brother fought against brother in the bloodiest war this country has ever known. How holding human beings is wrong and freeing them is worth fighting for.

That may be the conclusion that we reach in the end, but it doesn't mean that people are going to argue about the statues in the meantime.

Also, the people who put up the statues may not have thought about the Civil War in quite that way and there may still be people around who take a very different view of the Civil War and its outcome.

now we are allowing people to era e that history and those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. It’s like the Arabs tearing down the statues of Egyptian king in an attempt to erase history, or the Taliban destroying the Bamiyan Statues in Afghanistan. It’s ignorant, and it cheats future generations of a chance to grow and learn

To the extent that statues are actually being destroyed, yes. But in many cases, they're being moved. Maybe a museum will display them.

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).