Here we are. The year is 2017, in the midst of one of the single most progressive time periods in the 200,000 years of human history. We’re a lot of things, us people. We are, at our very core, resilient. Keep in mind that word: resilient.

We’ve suffered trial after trial after trial after trial for thousands of years. That said, the past 2,000 years alone have been some of the hardest years humanity has faced. And every time, we’ve bounced back. The past 300 years have been pretty hard, too. Famine and conflict after famine and conflict. In the United States, we’ve faced the Civil War, the Great War, World War II, the Jim Crow era and things like that.

Make no mistake, many of these events were due to the actions of people whose motives encompassed the worst attributes of Humanity. They were fueled by racism and prejudices caused by ignorance and hate and fear of something different than themselves.

In the southern United States and in New Orleans specifically, these horrible traits ran rampant. Racism and discrimination were things that we used to be known for, much like Mississippi and Alabama. These were trials that we faced as people. And we’re still bouncing back.

As I understand it, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and the city of New Orleans started taking down monuments to historical figures from the Civil War and other eras around that time. Specifically, they’re taking down the obelisk dedicated to the Battle of Liberty Place, statues of both Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard, who were generals of the Confederate States of America, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

A monument, by definition, is something that commemorates a famous figure or a person worth noting, typically in the interest of honoring them. The honoring part is where these statues of Confederate leaders becomes an issue.

These are men who, in my opinion, abandoned the ideals of our nation and while the most notable factor of their motives was not their sole intention, they prided themselves on the worst aspects of humanity simply by aligning themselves with those who would have preferred people of color remain in chains. I know that Robert E. Lee called slavery “a moral and political evil in any country.” He was a complex man, but he was still a man of his time. He owned slaves. Regardless of how he treated them, they were still slaves. Jefferson Davis led the country that ultimately supported that slavery. P.G.T. Beauregard aligned himself with these ideals, regardless of his intentions. The support of slavery by the Confederation is not negotiable; it’s a fact.

That said, the monuments to these men do not reflect the ideals and the resilience that we have as people. I think these are not men we should honor, they are men we should study and learn from and learn what not to do. 

Now, there are people who think that this is erasing history. To put it simply: it’s not. The city isn’t destroying these monuments. It is simply storing them until they can place them elsewhere in the proper context. The city isn’t erasing its history, it’s showing that we have learned from and do not support ideals that exclude the unity that we need to survive. 

Taking down these statues is us bouncing back from a plague that we are still facing today. New Orleans wouldn’t be what it is without the people we have. Should we really honor those who sought to keep some of us in chains and considered to be less than people? I don’t think so.