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Comment by happytoexplain | Hacker News Reader

I find it hard to imagine that you'd sneer in "disgust" and accuse people of "destruction" and "chaos" if they were knocking over a statue of somebody who murdered your family. This accusation is extremely easy to make, and it's always hypocritical on a long enough timeline.

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A decision to topple a statue should be made by the consensus of the people, not by the voluntaristic actions of the few. To sidestep the people's consensus is to undermine the democratic principles of governance, and with it the foundation of our society.

There is a lot more at stake here than the statues. Today you support a lawless action of the few because they satiate your vengeance, tomorrow someone else will undermine the law to your detriment because it benefits them. Where does that leave us?

Hypothetically, and without rancor, please consider what "consensus of the people" would look like if "democratic principles of governance" (as a system) were failing or not serving the governed.

I'm not harmed by a toppled statue. I don't have to look at this statue in my community every day. For me these are really hypothetical questions I can look at from some distance.

What strikes me as close to home is this: "All lives can't matter until black lives matter" (protest sign on Instagram). This is happening n o w. This is history in the making.

Favorite meme I've seen about the confederate statues goes like: "If someone kidnapped your child and sold them, where would you want us to put a statue of that person?"

The one for Thomas Jefferson could be "if someone did more for the freedom and prosperity of the world than anyone else ever, where would you like the statue?"

"If". I would suggest, for freedom, that Abraham Lincoln did more to increase freedom by directly emancipating millions of slaves; for prosperity, I'd choose Albert Sabin, one of the vaccinators against polio. What, exactly, did Jefferson do that is comparable?

Wrote the declaration of independence and the US constitution, which created the first government based on the concept of unalienable human rights and was a great inspiration for later democracies.

You mean the same constitution that allowed slavery and counted slaves as 3/5 of a person?

I know this is a very tricky point so Ill use short words: people who have done great things can also have done bad things.

So yeah. It’s a great thing to create a “democracy” that was only democratic for White Males. Even women didn’t have the right to vote. Let’s just gloss over that. Why not? That’s what the entire US educational system does.

Did you know martin luther king was a plagiarist and a philanderer in addition to being a great civil rights leader? Should we bring down his statues?

Even so are you really comparing that to slavery?

I bet his slaves would beg to differ....

You think they're going to stop after the Confederate statues?

We may even start replacing streets named after European explorers with people who killed them like Lapu-Lapu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapu-Lapu

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