A cura di @Anna.

Jamie Hodgkins si interroga su Sapiens sul valore dei simboli e su cosa dicono della società contemporanea quelli che abbiamo ereditato dal passato e fatto nostri.

Future archaeologists will find and interpret our community’s symbols to understand the values of our time. Perhaps thinking about the deep mark our actions will leave on the future historical record will hammer home the importance of the signs, names, statues, and symbols that we allow to persist in our society. We should ask what these cultural symbols say about our identity or our comfort with past ideologies. And if we don’t like the answer, then we should invest in a change.

Removing symbols that have a dark history doesn’t erase past wrongs, but it does acknowledge those harms and open the door for a better future: concepts that are understood by our local middle schoolers who have pushed to remove the name Stapleton from their school. Perhaps in this case, our future generation can influence the past.

Immagine da Flickr.