Teach - Don't Cancel

 

Image courtesy dictionary.com

We hear so much today, gentle reader, about "cancel culture".

As usual, most of what we hear emanates from across the Pacific. The Americans have been doing this kind of thing for years, but it seems to have caught on in Oz.

To be perfectly frank, to me the notion of destroying a symbol because you object to what it stood for is adolescent.

Surely, if the evil that men do lives after them (as the bard suggests), it should be remembered, rather than forgotten. You would hope that the recall of past evil would help guard against its recurrence. 

Cancel cancel is nothing new.

When I lived in Mount Isa in the nineties, there was a memorial on the Barkly Highway, near Kajabbi and not far from the site of Battle Mountain where a massacre of Kalkadoon people occured in 1884.

This monument was destroyed by gelignite twice in the five years I lived in Mount Isa. It was an easy target, because it was sited on the highway in the middle of nowhere. 

It has been rebuilt.

Perhaps, instead of destroying symbols (statues or whatever) informative and accurate information should be displayed on or near them. This would have the benefit of informing about evil past deeds, rather than obliterating their memory.

As both a student and teacher of history, I've always regarded the truth as instructive.