“We’re just here to help place a monument that was to have been in a cemetery where it needs to be,” Fort Smith City Administrator, Carl E. Geffken said. “There are more confederate soldiers buried in Oak Cemetery than there are in the National Cemetery here in Fort Smith and that was where the monument was initially going to be placed. We would donate that land to the UDC.”
“What Mr. Geffken has offered is a non-offer, a non-thought-filled offer and in fact it’s insulting,” said Joey McCutchen, an attorney who represents the local chapter of the UDC. “We would be fools to accept his offer.”
Geffken told 40/29 News he got an estimate of the cost to move the monument from the courthouse to historic Oak Cemetery. The bid came in at $90,000.
None of the money would come from taxpayers, Geffken said.
The plan would give the UDC a perpetual easement to the monument.
McCutchen told 40/29 News that’s not good enough, “Why would the UDC move from one government owned parcel to another government owned parcel so that the next time somebody’s not happy and when somebody wants to erase history they can move the monument again. We’re not interested in that, that’s never been part of the discussion. The discussions have always been regarding a private agreement, just like we just hammered out in Bentonville, which has taken over a year and a half.”
Month: September 2020
Where Does It End?
Our great nation’s history is replete with what can be viewed as “hurtful and hateful” history. Slavery was implicitly permitted in the original Constitution. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned slaves. Abraham Lincoln was a white supremacist. In an 1858 debate Lincoln made the following statements: “…I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” Should men like Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, Pike, Lee and Parker be viewed in the context of their time or in the prism of modern values? I believe the former.
There is danger and a slippery slope when removing, revising, sanitizing and erasing history. It is my belief that we should keep all of our history before us. As our first Black Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated, “When you start wiping out your history, sanitizing your history to make you feel better it’s a bad thing.”
If the logic of the iconoclasts were to be applied universally, every monument or structure built before our time must be targeted for destruction. Every temple and shrine of ancient or classic antiquity must be destroyed throughout the world so that no one is reminded of the simple fact that the ancestors of everyone alive on planet Earth once believed and practiced things which we today find wrong.
Psychedelic Pseconds
For September’s helping, it’s “Summer’s Almost Gone” by the Doors.