"But the statue does not commemorate slavery, or even the war aims of the Confederate states. It commemorates the soldiers who served and died in what is still America’s bloodiest war."
Adios, Johnny Reb
Progressive Beatitude: Blessed be the Hell Raisers, for they Shall Be Catered To.
Tampa
The same Republican-majority commission voted 4-3 last month to keep the statue. But then the anti-statue crowd began to reason with them. Phone calls, demonstrations, lots of yelling, politicians pandering to their constituencies. Some of the forensic tactics included death threats to a least one commissioner. So, having the matter thus explained to them, four of the seven fell in line Wednesday, as just about anyone paying attention knew they would. The vote came after a three-and-a-half-hour public hearing with both sides well-represented, and all the cheering and jeering one would expect at such a séance. At the end, the anti-statue crowd carried the day. No surprise. Does anyone even remember when a noisy pressure group did not get what it wanted?
-go to links-
In line with other jumpy
elected officials in jurisdictions below the Mason and Dixon, county
commissioners in Hillsborough County, Florida voted 4-2 Wednesday to
remove the monument to Confederate soldiers that have stood in front of
the Hillsborough County Courthouse in Tampa for more than a century,
doing no discernible harm to anyone. Jim Crow was run out of town with
the statue in place. But in our ever more difficult search to find
remaining vestiges of anti-black racism, the hell-raisers fastened on the statue. And so it had to go.
The
statue will be removed from county property and shipped to a private
cemetery in Brandon, a suburb of Tampa. Appropriate enough, because any
tolerance for appreciation of Southern history is as dead as the
statue’s new neighbors. “Old times there are not forgotten,” the song
teaches us. But they will be if the hell-raisers have their way.The same Republican-majority commission voted 4-3 last month to keep the statue. But then the anti-statue crowd began to reason with them. Phone calls, demonstrations, lots of yelling, politicians pandering to their constituencies. Some of the forensic tactics included death threats to a least one commissioner. So, having the matter thus explained to them, four of the seven fell in line Wednesday, as just about anyone paying attention knew they would. The vote came after a three-and-a-half-hour public hearing with both sides well-represented, and all the cheering and jeering one would expect at such a séance. At the end, the anti-statue crowd carried the day. No surprise. Does anyone even remember when a noisy pressure group did not get what it wanted?
-go to links-
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