Well, that didn’t take long. Remember this from way back in…June?
Any human being we’re going to name ships after is going to offend someone. Should we rename the USNS Maury, who despite contributing much to the study of weather and oceanography, fought in the Confederate Navy? Or the USNS Cesar Chavez, who advocated against immigration? Should we look deeper into the Kennedy family, which has plenty of skeletons in the closet and has two ships named after John and Robert Kennedy?
From “Renaming the Stennis is dumb“
Well, it happened
And its officially happening, as part of a larger effort to rename…everything.
All told, according to commission member Lawrence Romo, the list topped out at 1,100 items, from posts and ships to monuments, building names and streets.
Among the monuments recommended for removal in part 3 of the report is a Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.
“The statue atop of the monument should be removed. All bronze elements on the monument should be deconstructed and removed, preferably leaving the granite base and foundation in place to minimize risk of inadvertent disturbance of graves,” according to a Wednesday release, leaving the Army in charge of disposal.
From The Air Force Times
As I predicted before, anything named after people is destined to become a hot issue. We discover things long after someone dies, and perhaps the person isn’t quite who we thought they were. Or that person was biased against skin color, sexual orientation, or who knows what, which makes them 100% unacceptable now. Now, we could use that as an opportunity to highlight that people are fallible and we’ll have to accept both the good and bad that comes with that. We could highlight how brilliant people can still succumb to everything from the Confederacy to Nazism, and use that to teach our future generations how to not fall into that trap. Or we can simply say those people are evil and scrub them from mention while looking for the next person to cancel.
Never mind that Matthew Maury contributed a lot to our understanding of oceanography. He’ll get scrubbed from existence. And don’t worry, its coming for Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Cesar Chavez, and many others. Want to bet Donald Trump is on that list? Or what about lesser known people like Kyle Rittenhouse, whose only “crime” was standing up to criminals?
At some point we’ll either learn to accept that historical figures will always have flaws when viewed from the present day, or we’ll risk repeating their mistakes in the future.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. You ought to buy the author’s book, or listen to it on Audible, to help support his writing efforts.
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