A solution to the ongoing debate about monuments

I believe that parents and staff at Clinton Public School, in Toronto’s Little Italy — a historic institution that my kid attended — have solved the global statue dilemma.

What are you gonna do with those monuments to slavers, misogynists, racists, conquistadores, bloodsucking capitalists, who created the modern world and kindly passed it to us?

Tear ’em down and leave them rotting in harbours and fields? “Contextualize” them in museums? Conduct classes at their stony feet? (“Show students how Columbus was lionized in a history text, and have them read ‘Devastation of the Indies’ by de Las Casas,” said one U.S. historian. Right. Bore them into rightthinking citizenhood.)

Till now, my favoured solution was Moscow’s Fallen Monuments Park. You take all those statues of Stalin, Lenin, KGB founder Dzerzhinsky — and dump them, with severed heads and limbs, defaced in creative ways, in a big pleasant park in no particular order where folks can wander around making of the past what they will. It’s been proposed elsewhere, like Yorkshire in the U.K., where “it could also bring important investment to the region.” Can’t beat that combo.

But Clinton, coming at it sideways, has begun a campaign to erect a statue to the redoubtable Zilda (Silva), who’s run the office there for 30 years. She’s the glue that held the place together and the heart that kept it human. She pinched kids’ cheeks, gave snacks to burned-out teachers, kept entitled parents in line (with warmth and wit). At the commencements, which I was once honoured to address, she got more tributes from the grade valedictorians than any teacher or principal. She’s been Clinton’s essential “essential worker.”

The brilliance is, you don’t perpetuate a situation where inevitably you’ll need to replace the new icons with newer ones (after their own flaws are exposed by Robespierre, till he too is, inexorably, exposed). Instead, you transform notions like hero and essential — and isn’t it about time? You create a new order of appreciation that makes the old one pathetic and obsolete.

I have to add this probably wouldn’t have happened without COVID-19. It has made it futile to deny the true heroes in this society: migrant agricultural workers, stock shelvers, nurses, ER doctors, cleaners, food deliverers, TTC drivers (dealing with angry outbursts among riders over masks). They’ve kept us going and what’ve we (people like me, in iso at home, cranking out phrases) given back?

But those Clinton innovators have also — and here’s where the mystical part comes — solved another puzzle: the connection between the unique, global COVID experience and the equally overwhelming and unprecedented anti-racist global uprising, the first of which somehow flowed seamlessly into the second. How did that happen? Sheer coincidence? I doubt it.

I know someone who says the link is people were done with being cooped up. Along came George Floyd’s murder and became the excuse for a jailbreak. But I think the link is justice and recognizing who are the truly worthy players among us versus lying pretenders. How can a plague be about justice? Because those with power knew COVID-19 was coming and what had to be done: plan, research, prep. Instead, they invested in pet drugs and baldness cures over vaccines that had lower profit returns. They chose just-in-time production versus storing up protective gear. But people had begun acquiring a sense of moral connections like these after the crash of 2008, which bailed out the perpetrators while leaving their victims struggling till this day.

Floyd was a ready symbol for the kind of injustices lurking in the pestilence because he’s a relatable person whose murder we witnessed. He also embodies a particular example — his people’s — who, as Cornel West hauntingly intones, have refused to react to endless provocations by creating a Black Ku Klux Klan. Racism, the plague — injustice is injustice and sometimes the boundaries dissolve.

So there are strong links between the COVID-19 experience, the Floyd antiracism uprisings, and the Clinton experiment in hero category regeneration. What remains is to make the Zilda statue a reality when she retires quite soon — a daunting task, like all big change. Nothing is given. It’s an embryo, a project.

Isn’t that always the way?