(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) A town of Long Islanders recently volunteered to take in statues of famous American historical figures, such as George Washington and Christopher Columbus, in order to prevent their imminent destruction by New York City bureaucrats.
Officials in the town of Brookhaven said they had several open spots where the statues could reside, and even offered to cover the cost of dismantling and shipping them from New York, according to the New York Post.
“You know, I didn’t want to comment on whether that was right or wrong because that’s a decision of the city,” said Town Supervisor Edward Romaine. “But I said, ‘If you’re going to do that, hey, we’ll take the statues.’”
Romaine praised the American founding fathers, saying the townspeople would “welcome having those statues.”
Despite facing a major budget shortfall and other priorities related to its ongoing immigration crisis, the far-left New York City Council recently voted to prioritize the removal of artwork and statues of historical figures with allegedly “problematic” pasts.
Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Peter Stuyvesant all owned slaves, making them politically incorrect historical figures according to the so-called scholarship of current critical-race theorist.
Following the work of Marxist-based historical revisionists such as Howard Zinn, modern historians often interpret Columbus as having treated Indians cruelly.
Romaine explained, however, that many of the figures had historical connections to the town of Brookhaven. Washington toured the city after the Revolutionary War; founding father Willaim Floyd lived in the town for much of his life.
“The Brookhaven Town Board knows the importance of our history in bringing us to the place we are today,” the letter sent to the NYC city council said.
“If we look through our eyes today and try to judge them for what they did years ago as some people may do they come away with a different view,” he added. “I look at their contribution to history overall. I look at what they’ve done.”
Brookhaven contains 20 to 25 parks, leaving plenty of space for the historic statues.
New York City Councilwoman Sandy Nurse, D-Brooklyn, who authored the bill, claimed she presented it to New York City’s Cultural Affairs Committee as a correction of history, not a cancellation of it.
Nurse said that if the statues could not come down altogether, the city should place plaques next to them explaining the sins of the subject.
“It’s a reckoning with the historical injustices that continue to haunt our cities,” she said.
The bill also would create a reparations task force similar to those that have controversially suggested remitting billions of dollars to black citizens for the historical atrocities their ancestors may or may not have experienced during slavery.
The practice was legal in New York from the early 1600s until it was abolished in 1827.
