Thank Goodness! Technology Will Save Historical Statues

A dear Muslim friend, a woman, traveled back to Iraq last year for a visit.  She brought me a bronze plate of a temple that is no longer in her country because it was destroyed by radicals.  She told me I was a special friend to her and this temple was a special building to her peaceful people, so she bought it for me as a souvenir of her trip.  Her heart is so sweet, I do appreciate the bronze plate and her thoughtfulness to connect me to it.  I must admit I have not looked up the building to see its history but nonetheless...

The American history is not one of all roses and rainbows but it is history.  Civilians may take umbrage with the history and decide to take statues down from the south, of which I was born and raised and would object to if it would stop this, but it is our story of how we came  to be, the good and the bad. If the stoics have taught anything it is "things in our control and things out of our control."

This removal of southern flags and statues is out of my control, so I will not bother objecting in a petition and march, after all it is just a flag or statue. All of us that were raised in the south are not racists. We did not come from plantation owner slave mentalities, most of us were servants and farmers ourselves making ends meet like everyone else.  Civil war ended that and those hard core racists have died long ago. There are a few leftover loud, crazy, racists left but they are not the majority. They soon will be silenced through education and time.

Taking statues down does not change the attitudes of the people.  Archaeologists may have the least amount of concern over the attitudes of any art or piece of a wall etc.  Archeologists want to preserve history and stories of the humans that formed the country, the culture, the religion, not just in the USA but the world over.

History also reveals many European religious movements destroyed precious artifacts of the people to take control of the people.  More evidence we need to think for ourselves and not let the media or anyone control our minds.

I grew up seeing the pyramids and the missing noses and as a child thought weather wore these features down. I was much older when I discovered the Nazis tried to blow these works of history and art up. To intentionally destroy artifacts was unconscionable to my Western mind.  Pyramids were built by Egyptian slaves but the story was there in a sphinx.

Archeologist Chance Coughenour asks, "Why would people destroy cultural heritage?" (Check out his TedTalk "How your pictures can help reclaim lost history" So thankful to see this talk, it relieved my mind so much.

Recently archeologists have designed a way to preserve these cherished relics.  Through pictures we all take of places and things of interest.  Because archeologists know they cannot take every angle of every art or statue from every angle to reconstruct through 3D images a smaller version of the original, they have designed two websites to date that we can download our own pictures to help them recreate and preserve history.  This is encouraging to me with all the destruction of history happening all over the world.  (And this is not to say these structures are being lost due to natural disasters, purposed destruction, war, and human stupidity, there are records of tourists climbing up on a statue to get a selfie only to topple it and break it.) Since humans are just that, human, technology will help us retrieve what is destroyed.

Two websites you can help if you have pictures are:

rekrei.org

reclaimhistory.org

Wow, maybe in light of... this museums will begin to allow visitors to take as many pictures as they want inside from now on? Robert E Lee, part of our cultural heritage history. After all General Lee surrendered to the North to unite this country and not lose more lives to a war.  He is very different from Hitler or Suddein Hussein, he is a peace loving American!