YOU SAY – Good or bad, don’t erase it from our societal memories

A sampling of comments on Armchair Mayor editorial, ‘Removal of Judge Begbie statue misguided’:

Kathrine Moore: Why do we have to keep apologising for things that happened before our time. Its the past we can’t change it we can only move forward and not let it happen again.

Graham Specht: The reason is because in many cases long-term or ‘permanent’ elements integrated into our surroundings or cultural behaviour are continuing to do harm to people. Individual people might not need to apologize, but institutions like governments have been avoiding it for too long. It’s a very overdue debt, and it needs to be acknowledged. As Canadians, many of us are disconnected from our heritage roots and have been living in fairly privileged social circumstances for several generations. But if you had living relatives who, along with many of their peers and across multiple generations, had been brutally savaged by an institution that continues to prosper today as a result of having taken advantage of that imbalance of power, you might feel the weight of that oppression as it exists today and not a long-past historical event.

Kelly Proctor: What what you are saying is, that we CAN rewrite history. This is stupid, it happened hundreds of years ago, let it go. My family genealogy goes straight back to 1604 and the Salem witch trials, does that mean I should ask the state of Massachusetts to pay me and my family back over and over for wrongfully killing Jon Proctor? What would it help? Nothing so quit trying to rewrite history.

Callie Chicoine: To those of you saying that First Nations people should “get over it”: would you tell a survivor of the Holocaust to “get over it”? Absolutely not!!! Then why do you feel it is acceptable to say “move on, get over it, it happened so long ago”? Remember that the last Residential School closed in 1996 and the effects of those wrongs are still being felt today. Until Canada no longer treats it First Nations people like second class citizens, no one will be able to “get over it”.

Joanne Hetherington: This just makes me angry…..One must know their history in order to avoid repeating it! Statues, such as Judge Begbie / Robert E Lee should be left exactly as they are. It is the monuments to our history that brings us together in thought & discussion of what took place, was it good/bad and what came out of it. It causes us to remember/learn/honour/discuss the person/place/thing it is commemorating. Whether it was good/bad depending on your personal view.. it was what it was and should not be erased from our societal memories.