Keep the statues or be doomed to repeat history
The New Orleans Mayor said this about the removal of the Confederate statue in his town:
“These statues are not just … innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.”
Why there? Why now? I watched a very old episode of the “The Twilight Zone” the other night, and comments at the end, about the German concentration camp Dachau, stunned me:
“Why do we keep it standing? All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzs — all of them … because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard.
“Into it, they shoveled all their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers.”
So, I drew a comparison to the Roman Colosseum. It was built by 60,000 slaves. Over 400,000 slaves (called gladiators) were killed during its 400 years of use. All for “entertainment purposes.” Why does it remain? It prods us to remember that evil existed in our world.
Today, the Colosseum has become not only a renowned tourist attraction, it is a symbol against capital punishment. Italy abolished the death penalty in 1948. Today, any time anyone in the world has their sentence of death overturned or they are released, the lights that illuminate the Colosseum at night change from white to gold. This color change also occurs whenever a jurisdiction abolishes the death penalty.
As we all know, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Keep the statues and monuments. Our memories are short. Cave Creek We want to hear from you. Comment on letters, columns and editorials online or via e-mail. » » turned away.
That was it, she never mentioned it again. Fast forward to today and you can’t open the newspaper or turn on the television without thinking she may have correctly predicted the final battle.
I wish I would have asked her for some stock picks. — Scottsdale
Anyone who plays poker knows that a player has a “tell” for when he’s bluffing (or lying). Well, I just realized that Pres. Trump has a “tell” — don’t know why it took me so long to realize that. His “tell” is his favorite phrase, the same one that car salesmen use: “Believe me.”
He says this when he is bluffing, lying or reciting alternative facts, which is so often that no one can keep count.
— Phoenix
Robert Robb’s praise of Gov. Doug Ducey for his stance on school reform and “putting the same dollars behind every student” is misplaced confidence in a measure that will not represent students equally.
It will siphon dollars from our public schools and subsidize those who can already afford private schools and do not need assistance.
The hastily passed voucher bill deserves a careful and clear-eyed look by the public. I urge readers to look carefully at the referendum measure sponsored by Save Our Schools. Let’s put it on the ballot and let the voters decide.
— Phoenix