Standards

Stephanie Grace distilled the monument controversy well in one paragraph yesterday.

The statues served less as testaments to the men they depicted than to the cause they represented, as propaganda to a particular point of view that dominated a particular time. Looking at them that way, as a number of council members took great care to do, frees the city of the obligation to determine the subjects’ particular merits or judge them by the standards of our time, not theirs.

Actually that's not exactly right.  By acknowledging the monuments are, in fact, Jim Crow propaganda documents and were initially intended as such we are judging them by the standards of their time and ours.  In fact, the notion that we live now in different "times" is false anyway.  This stuff just isn't that long ago. Most of us have grandparents and parents who remember when it happened.