This! This is what brings much of the context. Imagine if during the Civil Rights Movement a statue of a confederate general was put in place, maybe even right in front of the court house. These statues cause pain because, in many instances, they were placed there by segregationists to remind them of their subordinate status.
This may shed some of the approval my earlier posts have garnered, I'm actually pretty tolerant of monuments to horrible people. As long as that horrible person, amid all the horrible things horrible people do, accomplished something worth celebrating. Probably not going to convince me you like that person, and I would like to see such monuments amended with a plaque detailing their history.
It's hard to find a faultless hero... in anyone's history.
George Washington, kept slaves and even resisted manumission, even when encouraged by his abolitionist friends and colleagues. I think that as long as that truth does not get obscured, celebrating the same man's work to wrench us free from a monarchy and establish a more representative government is fair.
Christopher Columbus ... No, this guy was trash.
You don't want a statue go to the local government vote on it and if the vote goes in your favour remove it not just have a mob of morons pull down what they want
Suppose for a moment, you wake up tomorrow and your city has voted and approved the emplacement of a large statue right in front of city hall. Completely funded by private donations, the city government breaks ground on a statue showing a generic white police officer or American Soldier, crucified. It just so happens, you live in a city where the majority of your neighbors either support that anti-cop/ anti-military message or are indifferent enough to not vote against it.
What do you do? It's an appalling, violent image that you hate and perhaps even makes you feel threatened. But there it is, looking down with pained eyes every time you walk by. So you maybe peacefully protest the thing and work through legal channels to get it removed?
How many decades of this approach failing would it take before you start getting a little more tolerant of some vandal just hacking the thing down and tossing it into the ocean?