On statue removal, I'm in the same place as the overwhelming majority of Americans: statues of figures that don't embody our values should be removed from their perches on public land via legal process and put in appropriate museums. There is no reason to destroy public property.
PS/ When small groups of Americans—however righteous—decide through unilateral criminal action how to dispose of property all of us paid for, we create wounds in our national fabric that not only won't heal but will end up endangering all of us and especially our most vulnerable.
PS2/ But I also think that criminal acts can be handled in our justice system; only in the rarest of cases should they be politicized. There's no reason statue defacement incidents can't be handled in the normal course of the justice system rather than made into a Trumpist cause.
PS3/ Our legal processes are profoundly flawed and often racist, which is why when it comes to matters of statue removal they move slower than molasses. For that reason, massive nonviolent civil disobedience is often needed to push legal/administrative processes that are stalled.
PS4/ But what I'd encourage Americans not to believe is that we're the first to discover that mob action is incredibly quick and efficacious. Of course it is—that's why we succumb to it so easily. But it boomerangs back to hurt us and can as easily be used by mobs of evil intent.
PS5/ It was massive nonviolent protests that got the nation to the moment it's at now, where these risibile statues can be removed. It wasn't—in fact—the scattered incidents of looting. That should be a lesson for those insisting that violence is now the answer for these statues.
PS6/ One thing I will not need is a lecture on the Boston Tea Party. I was born and grew up in the Concord/Lexington area. Saying "because that happened, this can/must happen" is literally not an argument based on historical analysis or even sense broadly writ. It's just hot air.
PS7/ Your local city council is not King George III and this is not the 1770s. That shouldn't even have to be said.
PS8/ We need to have a far better understanding of history and a much better understanding of government in 2020 than to be blindly saying that anything we did in the 1770s is also what we should be doing today. That's just a general comment—not specifically about statue removal.
PS9/ There are those who rightly say, what if the problem isn't the processes but the officials? And what if the problem in changing the officials is a problem with districting and voting processes? Then *I'd* say...now you're getting it. Maybe the statue issue is way downstream.
PS10/ Maybe criminal action is being used to throw statues into harbors because it's easier than tackling the systemic problems that have made it so hard to remove these statues via regular order. Maybe a plan to change the system is more urgent than a plan to change the scenery.
PS11/ That said, I'm an "all of the above" person. I don't think you actually have to stop one action in order to engage in others if you have a sufficient groundswell of support for your movement that you have the bodies, time, and resources to fight on multiple fronts at once.
PS12/ I'm just aware that right now emotionally persuasive arguments are taking place of *actually* persuasive ones. In saying that I could be as easily referring to the dangerous radicals of the Trumpist camp as my wholly well-meaning, non-dangerous fellow progressive activists.
PS13/ I've been an activist for decades. It's often drudgery: collecting data, writing petitions, going to meetings, planning schema for stakeholder conferences, issuing proposals, sometimes marching. If your adrenaline is pumping in your activism, that's worth some reflection.
PS14/ Obviously, sometimes activism activates adrenaline. But I worry that we're raising a generation of activists who think it's not activism unless it's immediately emotionally satisfying and gets your adrenaline pumping. That's the sort of activism that craps out very quickly.
PS15/ You can't tear the head off a gerrymandered district and throw it in a lake. You can't graffiti an election it takes a year to run in. I'm not saying you don't fight statues—it's a matter of how. The question in activism is often, "Am I self-sacrificing or self-expressing?"
CONCLUSION/ We live in a nation where half the people vote, yet we're saying, in some instances, throwing a statue in a harbor is the only way to get things done. I think we should check back in on that theory when we have 100% voting participation by those of us who want change.
