The protests that swept the nation in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers have long since forgotten the reason for their existence. Many of those joining the protests had every intention of hijacking the protests for their own selfish purposes, including rioting, looting, and committing acts of violence against police and government buildings. And in one particularly sad instance, rioters ended up defacing a monument honoring black soldiers.
The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston is a memorial to Col. Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, an all-black unit of Union soldiers who fought in the Civil War. The memorial, aside from being one of the most famous sculptures created by renowned artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens (also the designer of famous US coins such as the $20 gold double eagle), was one of the first memorials to honor the efforts of black soldiers in the United States, and was unveiled in 1897.
Fundraising for the memorial was undertaken by veterans of the 54th Regiment, along with numerous other black Americans. Yet the protesters in Boston, being ignorant of history as all too many leftists are, defaced the memorial with graffiti, including anti-police and Black Lives Matter slogans. The irony of protests supposedly to protest police brutality against black men damaging monuments to honor the contributions of black Americans is all too rich.
Unfortunately, we’ve seen far too much of that in this wave of protests. How many times have we seen these protests hijacked by white Antifa agitators intent on destruction? How many times have we seen Black Lives Matter protests with not a single black person among them? How many times have we seen black Americans raging against the destructiveness of looters, only to be lectured by entitled white liberals who think they know better than black people themselves how black Americans should behave?
In these protests and riots we’re seeing the fruits of an “education” system that not only hasn’t educated young people about history, it has actively fed them a warped and skewed version of history that fits the left’s agenda to undermine this country and destroy individual rights. These useful idiots are now putting their ignorance on display, believing themselves both morally superior and more knowledgeable than the benighted deplorables they believe the rest of us to be. But as events in Boston demonstrated, often those who believe themselves to be enlightened are the most ignorant of all.
Image: Wikipedia