Last week, Charlottesville, Virginia Mayor Nikuyah Walker proposed ending recognition of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday as an official city holiday. Instead, she wants the city to celebrate the emancipation of local slaves a month earlier, as “Liberation and Freedom Day.” The proposal will be brought before the city council at either its June 17 or July 1 meeting, reports The Daily Progress, a local newspaper.
Charlottesville is the home to the University of Virginia, one of the United States’s premiere research and educational institutions, which Jefferson personally designed, founded, and led after serving as the U.S. president. It is Jefferson who wrote the words that became a promissory note of freedom for all people and that this nation cashed in its own blood. It is he who helped design a nation that has secured the most freedom for the most people in all of human history. All this means nothing, say today’s rageaholic iconoclasts, because he held slaves.
Walker, an independent who campaigned against the previous Democrat incumbent from the left, appears not to have publicly stated her reasons for her proposal, but we all can guess. The heavily Democratic Charlottesville City Council “voted in 2017 to commemorate the second of October as Indigenous Peoples Day rather than Columbus Day,” notes The Daily Progress. We all know why on that one, too.
This is resentment, envy, and ignorance, plain and simple. It assumes that someone who has done something terrible can never be recognized for what he has done that is great. It assumes that we should socially elevate those who have accomplished nothing over those who have built a great nation, simply because the former can land a valid criticism against the latter.
Followed to its logical conclusions, this line of thinking bans the idea of greatness itself. It subsumes all good actions to any possibly connected evil actions. It insists that the most defining feature of any person is his sins. And it pretends that simply by virtue of understanding that slavery is wrong, we who live today in the West are perfectly holy, and may freely and smugly condemn every single person who has ever gone before us, and brush away every insight and achievement of human history.
We, the great people of today, are the greatest ever, not because we’ve achieved anything significant, but because we think the correct thoughts about chattel slavery. That alone is enough to prove we are better than our ancestors, and may thus burn them on the ash heap of history.
This is not only ignorance, but hubris. It is a great steaming pile of unstudied, arrogant hypocrisy.
It costs nobody a single red cent to oppose slavery today. We don’t have to take up arms against our American brothers to end it. We don’t have to reorganize our entire economy and infrastructure. To stop it, not one of us has to die and have our bullet-riddled limbs sawed off without anesthetic (one in 13 of those who survived fighting the Civil War had amputated limbs). Not one of us has to be the family members, the wives and sisters and cousins, of people who must experience this to secure other people’s freedom, either.
We don’t have to figure out what to do with millions of neighbors who have been physically, spiritually, and mentally abused by our society in a way that righteously fills them with rage and endangers their ability to govern and provide for themselves. No. All we have to do is repeat the correct words that everybody has told us from our infancy about how bad is this thing that not one single person born in America today has ever experienced. Simple.
Not one of these overindoctrinated underachievers who want to rid our society of all heroes is fit to shine Thomas Jefferson’s boots. They couldn’t create a nation out of scratch if they tried. They couldn’t in a million years dedicate their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to establishing a country that would be among the first in world history end slavery through a near-suicidal deluge of its own blood, in a dedication to the words and the institutions Jefferson helped create: dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, and seeing that their government treats them so, at the cost of a higher percentage of deaths than it cost this nation to liberate the entire globe from Adolf Hitler.
So, while Jefferson is too dead to defend himself and the benefactors of his great ingenuities too maleducated by the government of his co-creation to give him the respect he deserves, these envious, cowardly, accomplish-nothings spit on his legacy. The very freedom these people use to dig up and roast his dead corpse they would not have without him. They use the priceless treasure he bought with his life for them like a piece of toilet paper on which to wipe their fetid excrescence.
Serfdom has been the general, persistent condition of mankind since the dawn of creation. We can always return to that condition. All it takes is one generation of impiety towards our precious heritage, and the eternal truths our fathers, even in their broken human condition, managed to point out to a posterity that now pours acid on them and laughs.
It’s certainly not perfect, and never has been, but the United States is the last refuge and the highest hope for human freedom on God’s green earth. We burn the nation that cherishes these self-evident truths at our peril.
"The Mayor"