So now all the rage is seeing what can be done across America to eliminate any evidence of anyone who ever existed who doesn’t fit into the inane and insane PC culture we now find ourselves living in. Confederate statues? Tear ’em down because the South fought to preserve the institution of slavery. Flags? Get rid of anything that even hints at the Confederacy because ditto. George Washington? Forget about his role in the American Revolution or his presidency, he owned slaves. Thomas Jefferson? Forget that he was the brains behind the Declaration of Independence and our third president, he owned slaves. Abraham Lincoln? Sure, he freed the slaves, but heck, he also fought to preserve the Union instead of immediately having everyone south of the Mason-Dixon boiled in oil.

Wasn’t it Honest Abe who famously said, “With malice towards none, with charity for all”? Well, malice has become the operative word of the day by leftist loons and their talking-head cronies in the mainstream media, with nary a hint of charity towards anyone who doesn’t believe the way they do.

How far do these clowns want to take this? Perform a purity test against every statue, street, building, park, name, and song that doesn’t measure up to their idea of moral equivalency? My God, now Red Sox owner John Henry is talking about wanting to rename Yawkey Way because previous owner Tom Yawkey was a racist. Forget all the fine work the Yawkey Foundation has done over the past several decades, ol’ Tom was a creature of his times and possessed less-than enlightened ideas about blacks. Does that mean the Foundation should be shut down? And Pittsburgh folks are talking about removing a statue dedicated to American composer Stephen Foster, who penned “Oh Susanna”, Camptown Races”, and “Old Folks At Home” because of references to darkies and Negroes of the time. I mean, where does it end?

To call these folks ignorant is to do injustice to the very definition of the word ignorance. But I don’t think it’s ignorance – at least as far as the leaders of this effort go. Sure, there are dopey followers who are just looking for an excuse to get out and raise mayhem, and others who are sheep heads just following the herd. But if you were look closely at what is truly going on you will see that there are leftist organizations funding these kinds of efforts for one reason and one reason only: to destabilize and ultimately destroy the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

Think about it: how long have these monuments and places been around? Decades. More than a century. And why now? If they were so offensive to African-Americans, why wasn’t the effort to whitewash and rewrite American history led by our first so-called “Black President”, William Jefferson Clinton? Or, more recently, our first actual black president, Barack Obama? You know why – because neither thought it important enough. Probably (like most African Americans, I guess) ol’ Barack never spent a moment of a day in his life contemplating whether some statue offended his sense of what was fair and what was right. And isn’t it funny how, while these monuments and things have been around for ages, it is now only after so many Southern states once reliably “blue” politically have all turned “red” that Civil War-era controversies are being brought to light?

But now Trump is elected President and the loony left still can’t get out of their tantrum mode. So they do what children do when they can’t get something they want: they stomp their feet, cry, moan, and determine themselves to make everyone else know just how unhappy and miserable they are. That’s all this is. The liberal Left couldn’t make the Russia collusion thing stick, so they return once again to the one remaining card they have in their deck: the race card. And what’s truly sad about it is that there’s no one in the national GOP with the guts to counter what’s going on out there and reveal this for what it is. Worse, as in the case at Charlottesville, you have law enforcement unwilling to step in, keep order, and protect public property in the interests of protecting lives and maintaining law and order.

This is a very dangerous slope we are sitting on. Movements by their very nature have their own organic energies. Those kinds of movements that are destructive to the civic good and law and order needs to be countered with the only thing folks understand – massive and concerted force. Protests are fine and are part of our constitutional framework, but they need to be orderly and law-abiding. At the first sign of trouble, law enforcement must move in and restore order. To do anything less not only emboldens these morons to go even further with their message (which, to take it to its fullest extent, is the overthrow of the government and the end of Donald Trump’s presidency), but further erodes respect for the rule of law and confidence in our law enforcement community to maintain it.

Sure, you can pooh-pooh what I’m saying, but right now you’re seeing all the ingredients needed for, if not massive civil unrest like we saw in the Vietnam war protests of the late ’60s and early ’70s, a true civil war between competing ideologies that have no interest in listening to one another. If it were only about a bunch of monuments only pigeons care the most about that would be one thing: folks can decide by the ballot box what ought to be done with them in the public interest, but mob rule has to be countered and dealt with at the local level before this kind of thing really starts getting out of hand.

I realize this is a complex issue: we’re talking about our nation’s history and traditions and very different times. One simply cannot impose today’s culture and norms on an earlier one – that’s the very nature of history and sociology. Anyone with a brain ought to be able to understand that. What it all really comes down to is that as a nation we are still struggling with what boils down to our identity as Americans. The Civil War era might have been a long time ago, but the Civil Rights era wasn’t. Most folks would say that we’ve come a great way in how folks are treated regardless of the color of their skin, but there remain agitators out there who are interested only in stoking the flames of division along every kind of line you can think of. Our history ought to be a continual starting point for dialog, understanding, and reflection, not malice, violence, and destruction.

Lincoln’s words in his second inaugural address are just a relevant today as they were more than 150 years ago. I just wish there were grown-ups in the room willing to put his words into action.