Activists Move on from Targeting Confederate Statues, Now Have Abe Lincoln in Their Sights
So-called “cancel culture” has reached a new level of stupidity, as left-wing activists have transcended far beyond demanding the removal of Confederate statues and monuments.
Now, they have set in their sights a statue honoring the man who freed the slaves.
Politicians beware: Give the liberal mob an inch and they will take a mile.
A memorial in Boston’s Park Square called the Emancipation Memorial — also known as Freedman’s Memorial — depicts Abraham Lincoln as “The Great Emancipator,” with Lincoln “standing over a kneeling slave beckoning him to rise to claim his freedom,” according to WBUR.
The inscription at the base of the statue sums up what it is intended to convey: “A race set free and the country at peace. Lincoln rests from his labors.”
The fact that such a monument exists make sense. After all, it was President Lincoln who in 1863 issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves. With that in mind, the statue should symbolize and honor the concept of freedom.
Unfortunately, the newly emboldened left sees the situation a little differently.
Tory Bullock, an African-American resident of Boston, has spearheaded a petition to remove the monument. The petition had more than 9,200 signatures as of Tuesday, and a spokesperson for Mayor Marty Walsh told WCVB that the Democrat supports removing the statue and is “willing to engage in a dialogue with the community about its future in Boston.”
“My problem is with the person in front of [Lincoln], the person that’s supposed to represent me and my people,” Bullock told Fox News on Monday. “He’s not clothed, he’s in chains, it’s just not a good representation for something that’s supposed to represent equality and the Emancipation Proclamation.”
“It says that it’s a statue that’s supposed to represent freedom. But, to me, it represents submissiveness,” he added to WCVB. “It represents: ‘Know your place, because that’s where you belong.'”
Bullock apparently fails to realize that by freeing the slaves, Lincoln was sending the message that African-Americans “belong” in the American fabric as equal members of society, not as second-class citizens.
The Emancipation Proclamation represented a turning point in American history that set the stage for African-Americans being recognized as fully equal under the law thanks to the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. (Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be until the civil rights movement — and accompanying legislation — of the 1950s and 60s that those rights were set in stone following decades of oppression under Jim Crow laws, but it was the Emancipation Proclamation that set the stage for African-Americans to eventually be recognized as equal citizens.)
Left-wing activists declaring war on statues could apparently use a little refresher on American history. If they knew their history, they would not have defaced the statue of Matthias Baldwin, an abolitionist, with graffiti labeling him a “colonizer” and a “murderer.”
It has become clear that the indiscriminate war on statues and monuments that has engulfed America has little to do with racism anymore. This unfortunate phenomenon stems from a mentality subscribed to by many influential liberals, including New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, that America “was never that great.”
Therefore, every single monument that pays homage to American history, including the good parts of it, must be destroyed.
During a riot in Boston late last month, a monument honoring the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first all-volunteer black regiment of the Union during the Civil War, also became a target of the spray paint enthusiasts.
If the goal of the left-wing mob really is to push for racial equality, defacing this monument made absolutely no sense at all.
Sadly, the “tear it down” movement committed to defacing or removing “old” statues by force extends far beyond United States borders.
An Abraham Lincoln statue in the United Kingdom could not escape the wrath of the liberal mob either, finding itself covered in graffiti.
The global reach of this insanity proves that these far-left activists seek not only to undermine American history but to delegitimize western civilization as a whole.
Only when the mob achieves that goal and creates the Utopian society it has long envisioned will the looting, defacing and overall war on statues that has tragically become the norm in the past three weeks finally come to an end.
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