Charlottesville

[L Verge]

Kate - I have posed that question myself...

Gene - Tongue-in-cheek points, but very good ones. There was an instance in Durham, North Carolina, over the weekend of a woman climbing one of the statues and yanking the head off. It got very little press time. I wondered if there isn't some law somewhere about damaging and defacing such public property. Maybe the press didn't want to get involved in that one? If they find the person who vandalized the Lincoln Memorial, will he/she be prosecuted?

The mayor of Baltimore had four statues removed in the cover of darkness the other day with very little notice (wise decision on her part to avoid these protests, perhaps), but isn't there a chain of command in various locales as to who really has the power to make such decisions on subjects that have been in place for at least fifty years?

I also understand that Statuary Hall at the Capitol will be having changes made. On the other side of the coin, I hope that the NPS is taking special care in protecting the new MLK statue.

This rampant "stupidity" (can't think of another appropriate word) has to stop. First thing this past Monday morning, I received a call from higher-ups wanting to make sure that we had no Confederate monuments here. They later asked if I knew of any such things in our county. Wikipedia actually has a site that lists all states and how many memorials they have and where. Maryland had four in Baltimore (until this week) and one on the Eastern Shore. Our county, Prince George's, has never had such a memorial -- even though it had the largest slave population in Maryland in 1860.