To the Protestors by Vito Tomasino June 22 2020
You tore down the statue of George Washington, the “Father of our country; the man who fought and won our freedom from an oppressive King. Why? Yes, he owned slaves; as did Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of The Declaration of Independence and one of the framers of our Constitution. He, along with other notable Americans like John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, James Madison, and others, risked their lives and fortunes to gain our independence from England. Some of these men, to whom statues have also been erected in recognition of their selfless contribution to our freedom, also owned slaves. Are their statues to be destroyed?
President Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves after fighting a bloody Civil War to hold our young republic together and you defaced his beautiful Memorial in Washington D. C. with your obscene graffiti. Why?
You did the same to the Washington Monument and WWII Memorial—belatedly installed to honor the hundreds of thousands of brave American men and women of all colors, who risked everything to preserve the hard won freedom our ancestors bequeathed us. If it were not for them, The Greatest Generation--those who fought on the front lines of that war, and the millions more who stayed behind to work the factories in support of it—we would all be speaking German, or Japanese. And the black-hooded, black-shirted, armed thugs you have been blindly following would, today, be wearing arm bands embellished with a black swastika, goose-stepping down 5th Avenue. And you and I—blacks, whites, reds, yellows, and browns alike—would once again experience the indignity, the cruelty, the sub-human existence of being a slave.
You think not? Think again. I challenge you to name one country in this world that has been in existence more than two hundred years, whose people have not only owned slaves at some time in their existence, or have themselves been slaves. Name one. My point is, there is not a single race of beings on this planet that has not, at some period in its history, either been a slave, or been the enslaver. If this is true, then how can you justify the senseless destruction of the very things we need to remind us of our propensity to enslave our fellow man…our history. If you succeed in obliterating our less than noble past, you will ensure its repetition.
If we take your protest to its logical conclusion—given the history of slavery in our world—the national flag of every country on this planet is a symbol of oppression and must come down.
You tore down the statue of George Washington, the “Father of our country; the man who fought and won our freedom from an oppressive King. Why? Yes, he owned slaves; as did Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of The Declaration of Independence and one of the framers of our Constitution. He, along with other notable Americans like John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, James Madison, and others, risked their lives and fortunes to gain our independence from England. Some of these men, to whom statues have also been erected in recognition of their selfless contribution to our freedom, also owned slaves. Are their statues to be destroyed?
President Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves after fighting a bloody Civil War to hold our young republic together and you defaced his beautiful Memorial in Washington D. C. with your obscene graffiti. Why?
You did the same to the Washington Monument and WWII Memorial—belatedly installed to honor the hundreds of thousands of brave American men and women of all colors, who risked everything to preserve the hard won freedom our ancestors bequeathed us. If it were not for them, The Greatest Generation--those who fought on the front lines of that war, and the millions more who stayed behind to work the factories in support of it—we would all be speaking German, or Japanese. And the black-hooded, black-shirted, armed thugs you have been blindly following would, today, be wearing arm bands embellished with a black swastika, goose-stepping down 5th Avenue. And you and I—blacks, whites, reds, yellows, and browns alike—would once again experience the indignity, the cruelty, the sub-human existence of being a slave.
You think not? Think again. I challenge you to name one country in this world that has been in existence more than two hundred years, whose people have not only owned slaves at some time in their existence, or have themselves been slaves. Name one. My point is, there is not a single race of beings on this planet that has not, at some period in its history, either been a slave, or been the enslaver. If this is true, then how can you justify the senseless destruction of the very things we need to remind us of our propensity to enslave our fellow man…our history. If you succeed in obliterating our less than noble past, you will ensure its repetition.
If we take your protest to its logical conclusion—given the history of slavery in our world—the national flag of every country on this planet is a symbol of oppression and must come down.
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