America’s history, traditions, and values that have served us well, and elevated the United States to greatness are being destroyed by Black Lives Matter, a fringe group that’s not even a decade old.
And they’re doing it with the blessing of local government leaders.
San Francisco is in the process of renaming some 44 school buildings that are named after public figures — past and present — because “black lives” didn’t matter enough to them.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
This represents more than one-third of the district’s 125 schools.
Included on the list are Herbert Hoover Middle School, (Theodore) Roosevelt Middle School, and Dianne Feinstein Elementary School. Sen. Feinstein’s name is on the chopping block because while serving as mayor in 1984, she permitted the Confederate flag to fly outside City Hall.
George Washington’s name will also be erased, along with Thomas Edison’s. But the strangest of all is Abraham Lincoln — the man who freed the slaves when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation — because he apparently didn’t “demonstrate that ‘black lives mattered to him,’” according to The Daily Mail.
Maybe it was because he was a Republican?
No matter what you may think of historical figures and symbols, the fact remains that they’re a part of our history — they’re the things that make us unique to the rest of the world. The Confederacy and Civil War are a part of our history, as are slavery and FDR placing Japanese-Americans in internment camps during World War II.
But the things to admire about America far outweigh those that should be reviled.
Also, we can’t judge historical figures using contemporary norms. When Washington was alive, slavery was considered a part of the natural order. Those beliefs change as we matured as a society — we became better as a people, and that transformation is a part of our history.
When we erase history, we erase a part of ourselves, our very identity.
On the opposite coast it’s getting just as nutty. In New York City it’s not the names on school buildings that are being revised; it’s what’s being taught within them.
The New York City teachers union passed a “Black Lives Matter at School” resolution Monday, and will send it to the Delegate Assembly for approval Wednesday night.
The resolution condemned the notion of the nuclear family — a father, a mother, and children — and said it should be replaced with a communal society.
“We are committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, and especially ‘our’ children to the degree that mothers, parents and children are comfortable.”
This idea is promoted by Noah Berlatsky, who’s written for NBC Think, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Foreign Policy.
Despite all the fancy bylines, he believes that “parents are tyrants. ‘Parent’ is an oppressive class, like rich people or white people.”
As my older brother Robert has told me, the nuclear family is the most basic political unit in society, and as such it’s also the most important. It’s how we learn right from wrong, how we’re taught to interact with others, and it’s who we initially turn to in times of trouble.
My friend Sue from North Palm Beach posted a meme Tuesday that describes the importance of parents in a nuclear family, called “I Was Raised.”
“I didn’t just grow up. I was taught to speak when I enter a room. Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ to have respect for my elders and to get off my lazy butt and let the elder in the room have my chair. Say ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir,’ lend a helping hand to those in need. Hold the door for the person behind me, say ‘excuse me’ when it’s needed and to love people for who they are and not for what I can get from them. I was also taught to treat people the way I want to be treated.”
That’s what we learn from families, because parents and siblings care — strangers in a “village” couldn’t care less.
But what’s most disturbing is this emphasis on race, this notion of Black Lives Matter, but all lives do not.
Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most unifying figures of the mid-20th century, and he did so with the simple truth that it’s the content of a person’s character that’s important — not the color of his skin.
BLM has taken us away from being a color blind society to once again become a destructively color-conscious one. They’ve divided America, and created discord and distrust.
The sooner they’re condemned as the corrosive influence they’ve become, the sooner America can heal and prosper. If they’re not destroyed, they’ll destroy us — our history, our values, and our identity as Americans.
