When Does It End?

Top of the evening to all...

Jewish Law forbids bowing down to statues.  I wonder if the vandals who keep toppling statues everywhere realize that they are helping to avoid the challenges of idolatry.

The latest...

A statue of Frederick Douglass was toppled damaged beyond repair in Rochester.  Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave.  He spoke eloquently at the 1848 Seneca Falls convention for women's suffrage, believing that he could not advocate for his own suffrage without advocating for others.  I do not get this one.

They also got the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen.  Written on the statue was "racist fish."  One wonders who the target of that graffiti might have been.  That was English.  It would have been "racistiske fisk" in Danish, if google translate is correct.

Given the destruction of one and the damaging of the other, I have realized that other statues and monuments must go the way of the world.

We go then from Copenhagen to Brussels.  In the town centre, there is a statue called "Manneken Pis."  It is a statue of a small child answering the call of nature.  This statue is glaring sexism.  Men do not have to wait in long lines to go to the washroom.  It must go.

Michelangelo's "David" must go, as it is anatomically incorrect.

In the Boston Public Garden, there is a statue of a mother duck and her ducklings.  The statue comes from the story "Make Way for Ducklings."  The statue must go, as it points to the absolute lie that the police could ever be so nice.  By the way, I would like to add in that the statue and the story are both sexist.  Ducks mate for life.  Where is the father?  Something is a-fowl here.

The legend (probably not right) of the naming of the city of Buffalo is that it got its name from French explorers.  Upon seeing the Niagara River, they exclaimed "what a beautiful river!"  They would have said that in French though - "quel beau fleuve!"  Say 'beau fleuve' a few times.  It probably did not happen, but since a statue was defaced with the words "probably racist" thereupon, we need to rename the city just in case.  Explorers were horrible to indigenous populations.

We must also rename the Nobel Prize.  While it is named in fact for the man who first endowed it, that man did extensive work in military-grade explosives.  His sins in creating weapons of war far outweigh the utter change of heart based on a newspaper mistake.

Please note: some of what is written above is tongue-in-cheek.

There are no perfect people.  If the only people we wish to honour in our statues, our currency, our stamps, and our building names must all have been perfect, then we will remember nothing about our past.  Demanding perfection will only leave us in a void, unable to build a future due to lacking a past.

I support having statues of imperfect people.  I would even like to consider a statue that is quite out of the ordinary.  A statue of Mikhail Kalishnikov would be appropriate.  In his closing years, he wrote a letter to the Russian Patriarch: "I keep having the same unsolved question: if my rifle claimed other people's lives, then can it be that I, a Christian and an Orthodox believer, was to blame for their deaths?"  That is a man whom we should consider.  He was accomplished, and troubled by his accomplishments.  He struggled.  That is real.  That is human.  And that is coming to terms with the imperfection of humanity.

Have a good evening.

R/SCG