Down with Abe Lincoln! Who’s next?
With a little whitewash and erasers
WHO NEEDS to be pulled along by right-wing conspiracies on Newsmax and OAN when you can open up the papers and read the Associated Press? Not everything crazy is made up by kooks with dark website addresses. Sometimes the news is just . . . news.
This past week, the San Francisco Board of Education (have we got your attention now?) voted 6-1 to change the name of 44 schools in the district. Names that are no longer worthy include: Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Francis Scott Key, among others.
As somebody mentioned, this is almost a parody of leftist activism.
They’re canceling Abraham Lincoln—consistently ranked as the most honorable president to ever hold office. And the father of our country George Washington, the Cincinnatus of our time. Also, Thomas Jefferson must go. Along with other presidents who were men of their time.
Most of the old dead white men are being canceled because of their views on slavery pre-Civil War. But why cancel Abe Lincoln? From the books we’ve read on the old boy, he was instrumental in destroying slavery in this country, even issuing the proclamation that emancipated a whole people from bondage.
According to dispatches, Abraham Lincoln didn’t have a modern person’s thoughts and beliefs about Native Americans and their treatment by the early American government. So that’s the reason his name must be tossed down the Memory Hole.
The cancel movement is beginning to eat its children. We note that the school board in San Fran has decided to cancel Dianne Feinstein as well, and remove her name from an elementary school. We do remember that she dared hug a Southern man—Senator Lindsey Graham—after the hearings for Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett last year.
But word has it that once upon a time, in a fit of ill humor, she replaced a Confederate flag that had been torn down in San Francisco. The story goes that when she was mayor of the city, back in 1984, somebody vandalized a long-standing flag display in front of City Hall. She replaced the offending cloth, which in 2021 can be considered poor form.
You can imagine there have been second thoughts. And third thoughts. And pushback to the pushback to the pushback. One person on Twitter (of course) said the city isn’t erasing history: “No, we’re just correcting it and fixing and red-lining a few errors.”
Ah! Correcting history. Just fixing a few errors.
As long as we’re correcting history and fixing its errors, why stop with school names? That whole American Civil War was a bit of nasty business. So was Jim Crow. Surely it would be better for our kids to think that the marchers for civil rights in this country had all the country behind them, and were cheered from corner to corner, from street to street, and nobody was mean enough to cancel a newspaper subscription because of civil rights, and nobody left a church in a huff because of what the preacher said. Oh, there are so many things in history to correct, we scarcely know where to begin!
Do you realize that women weren’t allowed to vote in federal elections in the United States until 1920? Let’s change that to 1820. Better yet, 1720. We’ll enlighten our ancestors if it kills them.
And why use stale and musty dates like 1776 and 1787 as the agreed-upon starting point of this nation’s history? Why not 1619? And call it a Project. The better to lead history discussions in our school, and our children astray. (Not to mention to haul in a Pulitzer.)
Just when you think the whole matter is silly, and only the most leftist of activists would really consent to canceling Abraham Lincoln, you realize that this is now public policy in some precincts. At a vote of 6-1.
We wonder: What must it be like to be that one?
One guess: Maddening. Just maddening.