Another statue gets attacked by a group that feels it’s an affront to the American people. This time, it was our founding forefather, Christopher Columbus, whom the group said represents genocide.
The attack happened earlier this week when members of the California Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, held a protest in front of the statue at the state capitol’s rotunda. The morals, as they have been referred to, obtained a legal permit to protest, but when they started climbing on the statue to hang banners, several were arrested.
BREAKING: Police have arrested the first peaceful moral witness. While a statue hailing genocide sits at the center of our capitol, we are removed from the building. #PoorPeoplesCampaign pic.twitter.com/FiBEKhj5NN
— California Poor People's Campaign (@CaliforniaPPC) June 4, 2018
The group’s website talks of peaceful demonstrations and actions but makes plenty of demands on the government. One of its biggest complaints is to restore voting rights, which it says has diminished vastly since 2016 with less voting polls, fewer hours and systematically restricting poor people and people of color from voting by putting the polls further away from these communities.
The morals champion the poor, people of color and indigenous. They claim there is a war against them and are determined to stop it:
From the Doctrine of Discovery that was used to justify the takeover of indigenous lands to the ongoing attempt to undermine and constrain tribal sovereignty and authority as independent nations, the U.S. has been waging a full-scale war on the very right of indigenous people to exist.
Their list of demands is quite large and a lot of it does make sense. However, there are some things that are just a bit outside, if you know what I mean. Take a look at the following examples:
- Immediate implementation of federal and state living wage law that include guaranteed annual incomes, full employment, and the right to form and join unions.
- Free tuition at colleges and universities.
- Repeal the 2017 federal tax law and redistribute the money to help the poor.
- “We demand an end to mass incarceration and the continuing inequalities for black, brown and poor white people within the criminal justice system.”
- An end to military aggression and war-mongering.
- An end to military spending. “We demand a reallocation of resources from the military budget to education, health care, jobs and green infrastructure needs, and strengthening a Veterans Administration system that must remain public.”
- Ban assault weapons and easy access to them.
- “We demand the demilitarization of our communities on the border and the interior. This includes ending federal programs that send military equipment into local and state communities and ceasing the call to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border.”
Essentially, they want to take from others to give to the poor. They want to make everyone equal across the board. A grand thought if such a thing exists, but that will never happen in the Utopia they are looking for in this world. The morals also want to take away our protection; both in the form of weapons and the security of a border wall. And they choose to spread their cause to the statue of Christopher Columbus.
Was Columbus a great man? Not hardly; but the statue (as were all the others that the left has had removed) are a symbol of our past. They remind us of the good and the bad and hopefully inspire us to not make the same mistakes. This statue is a part of our heritage. It’s artwork and should not be defiled by protesters climbing on it to hang their messages.
