House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was recently pressed on whether people in the streets should be toppling statues. She equivocated.
“People will do what they do,” she responded to a question about a particular group of rogues who took down and threw into Baltimore’s inner harbor a statue of Christopher Columbus that was funded by an Italian American heritage organization, sculpted of marble by an Italian American in Italy, shipped over from Italy, and dedicated by President Ronald Reagan.
There, Pelosi takes her stand, following the great and high moral tradition of … nobody. With those comments, Pelosi really stepped in it, because the pass unfurled her party’s primary philosophy — she trod all over its name in complete irony — in failing to endorse the employment of a democratic solution.
Those toppling statues of American heroes on par with George Washington, or equivocating about it, suggest that the very presence of those statues is injustice — remember that not all statues memorialize men of the same era or faction, and yet, they have nearly all been treated as such. Their presence and preservation, excluding those on private property, have been generally constituted in law. That’s why policymakers propose passing laws to make changes. It’s the democratic way.
In lieu of that practical inconvenience, the mobbish company took the matter into their own hands, rejecting the very peaceful, intellectually fortified methods of Martin Luther King Jr., in whose tradition many of those people presumably think they are acting.
“Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application,” King wrote in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail. “For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.”
In those words, King harnesses a commanding respect for the law, a hint at what he later in his letter considers the “highest respect for the law,” which is to be found in one’s willingness to accept a penalty of imprisonment for disobeying it. It’s an endorsement of democracy and especially of the great treasure of American democracy: the Constitution.
We have found this current brand of social rebels arguing instead that there is indeed something wrong with having a permit and any other category of things preventing me from getting my way. As slow as I am to say put words in the mouths of dead men, I would wager that King was not a “let’s topple” sort — in the same letter, he decries defying the law as the genesis of anarchy.
If only those parading in recent weeks would have clung to his words.
