Monuments on our minds

By RICHARD SHAW

In the last few weeks monuments have been on many people’s minds.
The thoughts in those minds are complicated.
In most of the country the removal of Civil War monuments that are dedicated to figures of the Confederacy has sparked controversy and even violence. Some see them as remnants of a failed slave state that continues to be revered while others see them as part of the history of their area that they are proud of.
In the west (mostly) the proposal to downsize land areas of historical monuments that were set aside by previous presidents has many grieving, others cheering.
Monuments that are set up or built by man have always been controversial. Think about how many old newsreels you have seen over the years of people in other countries pulling down statues of disposed leaders or past political figures. The one that comes to my mind is when Iraqis pulled down that statue of Saddam Husein in Baghdad after the Americans marched in a decade and a half ago. But there are many more reaching very far back in time.
Monuments are a funny thing; while many may revere an individual whose likeness was carved in stone or molded in plaster, others despise that same person or what the monument stands for. We seldom see monuments to people in a country that are not from that country. For instance would the British, who are our closest allies in the world, put up a monument to George Washington near Buckingham Palace because our country helped them beat Germany during World War II? Probably not. Some in Great Britain still consider him to be a traitor.
On the other hand, and I am not sure of this, are there any monuments in the United States to people like Winston Churchill who helped us beat the axis powers in that same war? We tend to not put up monuments of foreigners regardless of their standing.
As for the monuments presidents have created because certain areas have outstanding physical or historical features, it’s a hard thing to discern. Many of the people who lived and worked around the Grand Canyon before it was created didn’t want to see it protected. They saw it as a source of income and a would be violation of their rights as citizens who lived near it. But its hard today to find anyone today who disputes the fact that it was a good thinge, along with others such as Yellowstone or Glacier National Park.
Maybe those Confederate states’ monuments should come down, but what should be done with them? Should they just be put in a warehouse until a different generation decides they can come out of the dark, should they be moved to places where they are not as prominent and into areas where their historical significance would be more meaningful or should they just be destroyed?
As for Grand Staircase, Bears Ears and the many other set aside monuments that have been under review, who is more important to those monuments? The people who live next to them and rely on them in one way or another for at least some of their livelihood, or should the absentee owners, most of who will never see them, and many who don’t care much about them (which probably is the majority of the American people) be the ones to decide through congressional or executive action?
Over the years when I traveled a lot for business I would often bring up public land to people I visited in far away states. Despite the fact that things seem more heated today, I was pretty passionate to know what others in the country, in different places, thought about public land, how it was used and protected and what should be done with it. Ninety percent of those I engaged didn’t even realize there was such a thing or that there was any problem at all.
The controversies of the West are unique in this way; Easterners, Mid-westerners and Southerners alike would almost stare at me blankly about the situation. Some had visited national parks in the West, but most always thought the land around the parks was owned by someone else, someone with big money, not them. And as for other beautiful areas they had seen, not in the parks, when they were asked about them, they had no idea who owned them or took care of them. If you say the acronym BLM to most Easterners they often think you are talking about some large company or a kind of car they have never heard of. Their experience is fairly limited because they don’t face what we in the rural west deal with almost daily.
At one point in my travels I did get in a pretty heated discussion with a guy from New York City about public lands. He thought that everything owned by the federal government should be protected from any kind of use, except for those who wanted to go there on foot. He thought any kind of resource extraction or roads should be eliminated. I asked him how often he went to Central Park in Manhattan. He said that he went to the park quite often to jog, walk his dog, etc. I asked him how he would feel if the one end of the park such as The Loch and the North Woods were taken off the table to visit and enjoy. Certainly it wasn’t a perfect analogy but he did say he wouldn’t like it. We then had a good discussion, with some perspective on his part, about how people feel about surrounding areas they love being closed to them.
I did not write this column to give any solutions or answers to either of these controversies. However I do think we need to choose carefully rather than react to the emotions in both situations. Protecting areas that are special should still be a priority for all of us, yet we don’t want public lands to become only a mecca for a select few either. As for statues and man made monuments, there are a lot in this country that are questionable. Years ago when I visited some parts of the South they still seem to be wanting to fight the Civil War. But, we need to be careful. There are other statues around the country that glorify things or causes that some don’t like. Utah itself may have some controversial edifices itself. It has a lot of statues of Brigham Young who many in the country feel was a renegade and was a man who led a cult from the Midwest to the desert, and Utah isn’t alone in having edifices that were erected to controversial people.
There are a lot of shades of gray in the thinking on stone and plaster edifices and appointed monuments. Our country is divided in so many ways, we should think clearly about both because there are many other things in our world we need to be concerned with–ranging from poverty in our own country to the nuclear threat that North Korea poses. It seems everything nowadays becomes a sparking point for left vs. right, religion vs. religion (or non-religion), region vs. region.
I know the word compromise is not in many people’s vocabulary these days, but in some cases, and in a democracy, it needs to be a way of life, not an exception.