Knowing History

As a Genealogist and someone who majored in American and World History in College I see the current mob-mentality of renaming places and destroying monuments without any logical thought or historical preservation troubling. People have gone from calling for real change to just violently going after everything and anything they can (ie. Helen Keller, etc.)

While making trees I learn the dark secrets inside people’s families (slave-owners, Communists, Nazis, criminals, murderers, etc.) I also know that the deeper you look into things the more dark secrets you find since no one is perfect.

Most of the protesters destroying things and calling for everything with a dark past to be changed are Democrats.  Yet they don’t even understand the dark past of the Democratic Party they support. The Democratic Party of the US was founded in 1828 by Andrew Jackson (later US President from 1829-1837) who was a Southern Planation slave-owner who killed many American Indians (and passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830.)

 So from 1828 until 1932 the Democrats openly supported Slavery, the Black Codes and then Jim Crow as well as the murder and removal of American Indians in the US. That means, according to the protesters’ “logic,” every single monument or place named to honor a Democrat (ie. John F Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, etc.) needs to be renamed or destroyed and any supporter of the Democratic Party is only honoring their dark past.

I personally believe that all Confederate places should be renamed and all Confederate monuments removed (not destroyed since then you don’t remember your dark past.) I believe the same for Nazi and Communist names and monuments around the world.

I hear that making generalizations is bad and these protesters are doing just that: generalizing that anyone that supports a person, a political party, etc. is also part of supporting that dark past. Yet they seem to overlook their own “guilt” created by their own “logic” since it doesn’t support their viewpoint.  So in the words of many of these protesters: “Educate Yourself!”