Who cares about these dumb statues? It's not going to lead to an erasure of history or anything. These statues are seen by such a small percentage of the population. The black civil war regimen memorial in Boston, we talked about in another thread, I didn't even know existed and I lived in Boston. I'm more concerned with businesses like the Wendy's being burned, people work at those places. No one works at a statue.
I don't care about the statues very much. But I do think symbols are important. That's why I think it's OK and understand the importance of toppling statues honoring confederate symbols and why I'm opposed to toppling statues honoring people for doing legitimately great things.
I don't think toppling the statue of USG (or whichever "good guy") is some zeitgeist issue or anything, but I do think it reflects poorly on the individuals doing it and instances like it detract from the broader movement.
Eye of the beholder though, who determines what's good other than the person/people taking the statues down? In for a penny, in for a pound. Also in this specific case, I will strongly disagree that taking down a structure that you (general term) don't think should be taken down, takes away from the larger movement. First of all, that's a personal choice, for you to draw anything bigger out of, someone doing that. Secondly, what larger movement are we attributing this to? It isn't like this is a coordinated effort, it's just different people all around the world doing it. These people almost certainly have different motivations.
Of course it's eye of the beholder. Who determines what's good? I do. So do you. I think we can both have opinions about historical figures to determine whether or not we think defacing a particular statue is good, bad, or neutral. I'd place defacing a John C. Calhoun statue somewhere on the good/neutral continuum. I'd place defacing a USG statue near or at "bad." It bothers me some if a statue of USG or someone else I admire is destroyed.
I agree that it's unfair to take single instances of (perceived) bad behavior and attribute it to a wider, amorphous group, when that group doesn't endorse that behavior, and I try to my best not to do that. But I think that's kind of the environment we're in. When you have a broad protest movement across the country countering racial injustice, and, (apparently) it bleeds into destroying statues of people who had nothing to do with racial injustice or actively fought against it, it can appear inconsistent with the broader movement. I'm not holding BLM or the Protest (in general) accountable for it, but I do think these instances harm the message of the broader movement. It's easy (even if wrong) to look at the defacement of a USG statue and think "ok 'the protests' have jumped the shark" -- which is shitty.
