CHAPEL HILL – When mobs descended upon the Silent Sam confederate statue on the campus of UNC Chapel Hill multiple times in the last two years (eventually toppling it) their leaders often pointed to the level of security the statue requires and how much it costs as a reason to take it down. Aside from the the fact that the whole reason it needs security in the first place was because of lawless social justice warriors, those ‘woke’ mobs have now succeeded in possibly facilitating an even higher cost associated with protecting Silent Sam. MUCH higher.
“The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill‘s board and chancellor on Monday unveiled a plan to return Silent Sam, a statue of a Confederate soldier, to campus. The statue would be housed in a new building that would cost more than $5 million to construct and $800,000 a year to maintain.
By returning the statue to campus, officials hope to comply with a state law limiting the movement of memorials. By locating the statue in a building, with security, the university hopes to avoid additional efforts to destroy or take down the monument. Officials have also said that the building’s location, less prominent than the spot where the statue had been before, would lessen the offense many feel at honoring the Confederacy.
The UNC system’s Board of Governors still must approve the plan. Even if the board approves the plan, the controversy is not likely to end.”
As much as the university hopes to ‘avoid additional efforts to destroy’ the statue, they seem woefully ignorant of the lengths the social justice mob will go to make their point and the complete disregard they have for law and order.
What the board has done is merely agreed to construct a bigger, more expensive target for the mob. It doesn’t matter that it is in a less prominent place, as the cameras will follow the mob wherever they go to report on their shenanigans and amplify their narrative.
If they wanted to follow the law and reduce the impetus for destroying public property while the legal process of re-locating the statue drags on, perhaps they should make a point to actually enforce the law, arrest those who break it, offer no leniency on punishments.
If the Board of Governors approves this plan – spending millions in taxpayers’ money to avoid contesting the Left’s wanton desire for mob violence – how long before a stand down order is issued in the face of the inevitable social justice protest at this building?
The opposition to this statue, especially in light of the words spoken at its dedication, is understandable. However, taking offense to something, especially an inanimate object, does not give one license to disrupt the legal process. The university invited a progressively more outrageous response by treating the protesters with kid gloves.
Now their answer is to build a $5 million target for those protesters to continue their antics.
Read more here.
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