Statues depict flawed people

When I travel I enjoy looking at statues.

I admire sculpture as a brilliant art form. Statues are like three-dimensional pictures that sometimes give me a feeling for a city square, the physique of a model, the sense of a historic time, or perhaps the clothing of an age.

They possess no inherent human qualities.

I have seen statues of: Ramesses II, Queen Victoria, Emperor Napoleon, Mackenzie King, the Rushmore Memorial, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Nehru, Mandela, Catherine the Great ...

I wonder if all their decisions were wise and just? Did they make mistakes?

The statue doesn’t tell us. Any qualities you attribute to a statue, and whether you choose to honour or to despise the figure represented, are in the mind of the beholder, not inherent in the stone, bronze or wood.

John Dann, who sculpted the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald that was removed by the City of Victoria, said he was “making a portrait of the man, not an image of an idol.”

In the Orwellian world of Big Brother, all statues, pictures, documents, books, etc., are destroyed so that citizens are no longer reminded of the open and free life they once had.

All reminders of the past both good and evil were erased so evil could not be remedied.

Is this what the public now desires?

It makes me sad to think that all the statuary of the world could be destroyed because their living subjects were not models of perfection.

Verda Petry, Regina