On the Street

Blaise Barshaw: Maybe just nature. Maybe memorial trees or shrubs and a bench to sit on? Almost no one could argue that they would be bad for the city. Do most of the public really go to see a statue in reverence of the subject?

Jesse Swanson: Move the statues to museums where you can give historical context. Confederate statues to civil war battlefields. They should be with their soldiers. Seems pretty simple.

Hayley Olson: It seems there are quite a few people who truly believe that removing problematic monuments would somehow prevent historians from recounting and teaching history. But this is such a fallacy. Historians do not rely on monuments alone to teach us about the past.

Alicia Marie: I encourage everyone here who is resistant to the idea of removing the Mount Rushmore atrocity specifically to educate themselves on its actual history. It was designed by an arrogant buffoon and then desperately rebranded as a tourist trap... and all of this after it was created in the first place in flagrant violation of a Native treaty. It's not history. It's theft and vandalism. Get rid of it.

Ali Furmall: I think we need to recognize that monuments aren't telling history. They effectively turn humans into idols and rarely provide more than a paragraph of context for why some human is depicted larger than life. And the fact that so many people worship the statues blindly, without any acknowledgment of what battle, event, or purpose they represent, shows that the monuments likely actually obscure history by removing all the nuance and detail.

Tanasha L Alderson: History does not change by removing the monuments. We cannot pick and choose what we like from history. History is as it is. What we can do is move forward and learn from history. We can acknowledge what mistakes were made and recognize those who deserve it. We should leave the monuments alone and create more monuments that are inclusive of other deserving people. ♦