Last weekend, when I and a friend rode out to see the damage to the monuments, we rode by the Columbus Statue. At that time it was unmarked and I noted to my friend that it won't be long before the dumb asses get to it. Annnnnndd here we are.
Of course the bastards doing it like to think of themselves as morally superior to others and this justifies their actions. Frankly, I don't believe for one second that any of them give a damn about the "indigenous peoples," they just like to have an excuse to destroy things and puff themselves up as someones "saviors." They tell you that they are sympathetic to the indigenous people's plight. bull s***. All they know about indigenous people is what some numb nuts activist tells them to think. Of course those activists don't have any other cause beyond helping, right? 🙄
They like to tell you how the Indians, that's right, I said INDIANS, were peace-loving creatures at one with the land. That they had never seen violence until the white man came. Of course being history illiterate that is not surprising. They haven't been told about things like inter-tribal warfare for the purposes of taking land that belonged to another tribe. Oh, and my favorite Indian torture technique, yes I said torture, was the one where they would cut open an enemies stomach, pull out his intestines, tie them to a tree, and then force him to walk around the tree as his entrails are pulled out until he dies. I have to imagine that was pretty painful. Not what you would expect from "peace-loving" indigenous people, eh?
And what, exactly, do these protesters want from all of this? As a historian I have often spoken about the abuses of and the lying by the U.S. government toward the Indians, so I am not unfamiliar with their plight, but now what? Do they advocate "giving it back?" How would that work? Is that even possible at this point? Or maybe we could try to get the government, not you and me, THE GOVERNMENT, to stop lying to the Indian tribes and start treating them as the Americans that they are. I'd be OK with that. But tearing down statues of people from our past is not going to fix a damn thing.
