A community of peoples does not need to maintain the litany of names on streets, statues, or buildings etc. in perpetuity. Doing so truncates space for burgeoning epochs and seasonal evolutions in a fixed geographic area. Stagnancy leads to veneration of only the isolated truths of the empowered in the aperture of naming.
A statue is built. A statue is taken down. A name is awarded. Another in time supplants. The vacated space is a canvas for reinvention not evisceration of memory. Candle light moves focus of who a community is. The spectrum broadens to encompass interconnection.
We accept values associated with chosen symbols are us. When those values change, it is not an indictment of the man on the statue, but of recognition of the shift in the community from one season to the next acknowledging both pain and new birth. The statue was never the singular human, not the old stone or the new. The old statues and names in this overdue historical pivot represent genocide, the most mendacious economic historical exploitation in American history, and state-sanctioned endorsement of mythological white supremacy.
The protest of removal at the root is repression of participation in pain. Slavery is pain. Dying for injustice in a gray uniform is lesser, but still present pain. The man in stars and bars today is a latent costume of an old hoodwinked ignorance. We each bear capacity to learn, to grow in interconnection acknowledging the psychic and macroeconomic systems that poison the seed of the learned mind. Sentences like, "My ancestors were wrong. I am wrong. I was used and I am angry. I forgive myself. I am brave enough to change, to let go of this hurt and grow." That is the path through this rubble.
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