I am looking at a series of stories that have come across my desk. You have heard them all this morning in some form. One deals with the renaming of Yawkey Way. Another wants to ditch the name of the town of Amherst, the home of UMass to replace it with something that does not pay tribute to Lord Jeffrey Amherst, the man who killed Native Americans through tainted blankets.
And there are a series of statues that have been removed by force or by not.
Admittedly, I cannot live in shoes that I do not wear.
I do not know what it means to be a minority, or live in the south. I barely know what it is to live in the northeast.
I cannot tell you how it feels to be persecuted for something that I did not do, or did not believe.
I cannot not tell you what it feels like to feel the pain of despair of those times.
What I can tell you quite confidently is that you can remove all of the statues in all of the states that are offensive to someone.
You can rename Yawkey Way to Steinbrenner Blvd if you want.
You can name all the towns in all of the places in this world that are offensive to someone.
You can do all of that if you want.
But through all of that work and expense and emotion by someone, somewhere, what is the conclusion?
What's the next sentance?
The next thought?
If you remove it all, change the name and do all that people say that they want to do, we are left with one thing that should be the first thing.
Unless people change. Unless hearts are moved. Unless souls are lifted, we have the same problems of the world but called by different names.
And, isn't that what we want to avoid? Living the same problems over and over?
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