To all those who want names changed and statues torn down, you had better check out who Asheville is named after — yes, a major slaveowner. Please stop with the ridiculousness of all this.
— Betty Whitford
Marshall
Letter: Looking at you, Asheville
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Sounds like yet another person who doesn’t like to engage in critical thinking or analysis.
Just because we made a mistake in our past doesn’t mean we have to perpetuate it in the future.
But that’s just my opinion (man), I find this whole culture of “heritage worshippers” to be a very confusing bunch.
We change the things we can, Betty.
Don’t blame the hep cats in Asheville, Betty. They’re just catching onto a woke trend that we’uns in Madison County started years ago.
Remember when we changed “Lapland” to “Marshall” in the 1850s so we could get in tight with the progressive Whigs? How did that work out? Or when we turned “Duel Hill” into “Jewell Hill” and then into “Walnut” for that soothing, irenic vibe? Now it’s full of meditation retreats. And Lord knows what kind of anti-biblical bigotry possessed us to change “Sodom” to “Revere.” Think of all the great names for bed-and-breakfasts that were lost.
Listen to the voice of sad experience here. I know folks mean well, but you can’t go erasing names and replacing statues and moving around monuments of our heroes every time somebody gets offended by a little unspeakable depravity in the closet. It’s just not fair to all the people they didn’t enslave.
why are treasonous slave owners your heroes?
Because I’m as irony-challenged as you are.
I’m with Betty on this one. We have way more important problems facing the country than old statues and names. Taken to the extreme, we should be tearing down the US Capital Building……built entirely of slave labor. Or we can show some grace and accept that bad things happen in life, pause and reflect and move on.
The shrouding of the Vance Monument was an asinine waste of taxpayer money. And to add insult to injury, the shroud wasn’t even engineered safely or properly; thus the tarp blowing off from wind. Lucky the scaffolding didn’t come down too.
US history is chock full of misdeeds, violence against all sorts of peoples (foreign and at home) and lots of hypocrisy. Work to make sure it doesn’t happen on your watch. If anything, it makes more sense to leave these monuments alone as they could well serve as a reminder of what we should not be.
We all knew the white supremacist patriarchy wouldn’t want to change. We will still fight it because we have to, no matter how ridiculous our oppressors think we are.
When you are used to entitlement, equality feels like oppression. Poor Betty. I don’t really care, do U?