Another opinion on assessing our history

To the editor,

This is in regard to the statue of Cornwallis and its removal that has stirred up the politically-correct individuals in our society.

I know of his transgressions, his atrocities and his legacy of being a founder of Halifax.

Are we now going to sort out the historical facts, shove them aside, save the good stuff and ignore the bad? No, I believe that we’re capable of acknowledging the mistakes of the past, of which there are so many, too numerous to write down here without getting writer’s cramp.

For instance, Sir John A. Macdonald’s transgressions against the Indigenous people when he obtained their lands to fulfill his dream of Canada being connected from sea to sea. Or in Europe where the infamous concentration camps still stand to remind us of what one individual has done to enflame his people, to blot our history with his stain of evil.

Cornwallis, Sit John A., Hitler… an odd mixture of characters all have physical objects left behind to remind us of what power can do in the wrong hands at the wrong time.

History can’t be revised or altered, it is what has taken place. Physical objects can’t harm us as long as we know fully the rights and wrongs perpetrated in their names.

Does it now mean a school, a library should take down its name just because Cornwallis should be a hated word because we don’t like it now?

What other things, places, people are next on their politically-correct hit lists?

We all need to sit back and be more realistic in our historical erasing of what once was, and hopefully would never reoccur in our society today. Wilfred Mcnutt, Bible Hill