It's hard to take what's happening seriously, but the events in 70 percent black Baltimore over the past two days deserve a quick look. [Baltimore Mayor Had Statues Removed in ‘Best Interest of My City’, New York Times, 8-16-17]:
It was “in the best interest of my city,” Mayor Catherine Pugh said Wednesday, as she explained why she ordered Confederate monuments removed under the cover of darkness, days after violence broke out during a rally against the removal of a similar monument in neighboring Virginia.
Confederate statues removed from 70 percent black Baltimore. How long until we replace the national anthem because Francis Scott Key was a member of the American Colonization Society (he was influence to write it in Baltimore)? |
With no immediate public notice, no fund-raising, and no plan for a permanent location for the monuments once they had been excised — all things city officials once believed they would need — the mayor watched in the wee hours on Wednesday as contractors with cranes protected by a contingent of police officers lifted the monuments from their pedestals and rolled them away on flatbed trucks.
After the violent clashes in Charlottesville, Va., many city leaders and even some governors around the country have urged the removal of Confederate monuments in their jurisdictions — a typically bureaucratic process that, in cities like New Orleans and Charlottesville, have been met with legal delays that helped feed tensions surrounding their removal.
But, in an interview here, Ms. Pugh suggested the tense political climate had turned her city’s statues into a security threat and she said that her emergency powers allowed her to have them removed immediately.
“The mayor has the right to protect her city,” she said. “For me, the statues represented pain, and not only did I want to protect my city from any more of that pain, I also wanted to protect my city from any of the violence that was occurring around the nation. We don’t need that in Baltimore.”
"We don't need that in Baltimore."
But what 70 percent black Baltimore does need is a plan to stop the violence - none of which happens because of Confederate statues - since The Baltimore Sun's homicide tracker shows almost all of the homicide victims since early March 2017 have been black (and almost 99 percent of suspects have been black).
Because black people - not Confederate statues - are committing so much violence in the 70 percent black city of Baltimore, the same mayor who pulled down centuries-old statues in the cover of night now promises what the dwindling tax-base can't fund. [Mayor announces free community college as part of crime-fighting plan, WBALTV.com, 8-10-17]
They can remove the statues, but they can't stop the violence only confirming centuries-old stereotypes once compelling social policy to be enacted to protect western civilization from the consequences of Africans in America.