When Heroes Fall From Their Pedestals

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana.

Over here in my country, I do not know if it happens in other countries too. I have seen, I have entered, and I have even walked past a lot of schools, airports, religious buildings, houses, hostels, streets, and places that have been named after some famous people in the past. Even at this moment, most of the states over here usually have some statue that has been erected to honor certain people because we all see them as heroes. I have seen big institutions that have been changed from their initial name to the name of someone who has passed to honor that person, and no one dares to question it.

Though some of these people did well and they deserved the honor, while some did otherwise, they were lucky to be honored because someone who knows them or their relatives is in power to do so.

As years go by, even though I do not really attach much importance to some of these statues or monuments that I see because I do not know the full stories behind them, recently I have heard a series of stories about some who did well and some who destroyed the trust people had in them. I read a story recently of someone who is still being honored, but during his time, he supported slave trades in my country. And this made me even more furious that someone like that would be remembered to the extent of being honored by naming a school after him; some were even kings during their time.

This even reminds me of the modern age and how we now treat people online. These sets of people are already wealthy, and have made names for themselves, we praise them, and some can even die for them. Then suddenly, news flashes of their past evil acts begin to flood the internet, and some things they even indulge in in secret. Then all of a sudden, they want to wipe the slate clean just like that.

And to me, the answer to this prompt is not as direct as I have thought about it because if we say that we want to remove the names of these people from school buildings, streets, or even remove their monuments, that means that we remove them from history, and if we also leave them, it means that we are looking away from what they did. But what I will only suggest is that if we cannot learn from history, the full stories of those people should be told, and nothing should be left out. Their bad deeds and well as what they did right should be mapped out instead of looking away like it never happened. At least if everyone can see this, we can determine if we will honor those people in our minds or just see the evil that they are.

These days, I see how some people just erect monuments like it's nothing, forgetting that those things are history that people will continue to talk about, and from what I have learnt, history should not be one sided, it should show what we did right and what we did wrong, nothing should be hidden to make others feel comfortable.

Thank you for reading.

_{Images is mine}