Several Brooklyn Democrat activists are smarting this week after a firm rebuke from the U.S. Army. The activists, who include Congresswoman Yvette Clarke and (sigh) the Rev. Al Sharpton, demanded that the Army rename two Brooklyn streets that are named after generals in the Confederate military. But General Lee Avenue and Stonewall Jackson Drive won’t be changing their names anytime soon because the Army has rejected their requests for, cough cough, social justice.
Those streets at Fort Hamilton, said the Army in their letter, are named after men who are “an inextricable part of our military history.” As such, they will continue to be memorialized, no matter how bent of out shape it makes a handful of politicians with nothing better to do with their time.
“After over a century, any effort to rename memorializations on Fort Hamilton would be controversial and divisive,” Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff Diane Randon said in the letter. “This is contrary to the Nation’s original intent in naming these streets, which was the spirit of reconciliation.”
Both Lee and Jackson, of course, were proud members of the U.S. military decades before the Civil War. In their time as leaders in the “Union,” as it were, they both served at Fort Hamilton at various points in their careers.
Clarke was unhappy about the response, telling the New York Daily News that the fight was not over.
“These monuments are deeply offensive to the hundreds of thousands of Brooklyn residents and members of the armed forces stationed at Fort Hamilton whose ancestors Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson fought to hold in slavery,” she said. “For too many years, the United States has refused to reckon with that history.”
Please. Sometimes it feels like the United States does nothing OTHER than “reckon with that history.” Is Clarke serious? Nothing else in our national past gets as much attention as the enslavement of blacks. We’re certainly not suggesting that this is an era of our history we should cover up or strive to forget, but let’s get real. The idea that we’re somehow trying to whitewash that history just doesn’t pass the smell test.
Besides, that has nothing to do with what’s going on here. These memorials are not suddenly “deeply offensive” to anyone. They are the left’s newest cause celebre – a rallying point around which they can create a problem where none exists. It’s so much easier to build a “problem” out of straw and then knock it down than it is to actually address the issues facing the American people here and now, in the present moment. And we’re sure it makes for a great donation strategy as well.
These activists have plenty of sway when it comes to Democratic-run city councils in New Orleans and corporate stores like Amazon…but they don’t have any when it comes to the U.S. military. So we’ll enjoy this little smackdown of political correctness for the time being, even if we know that, like Clarke herself said, the fight is not over.
