1. While I don’t advocate vandalism, I do wonder if it isn’t time to rethink all of our statues — not merely Confederate ones or slaveholders — and ask whether they continue to reflect our values.

2. Rethinking statues is inevitable and good. Statues convey permanency, purport to stand for all time. But change occurs. Power fades. Values change. Heroes become villains. Marble is reduced to dust. Like that poem Ozymandius, even great empires become sand.

3. Furthermore, I think in America our past — and in particular the storybook mythological heroic perfected understanding of our past — has become an albatross around our neck. It prevents us from seeing our past — and more importantly our present, with clear eyes.

4. And it’s precisely that understanding of our past that statues convey. They are almost universally designed to convey heroism, to celebrate greatness. The people represented were human, flawed, their legacy complex and contradictory. But that’s not at all what statues convey.

5. In other words maybe the problem with the statues is not merely that some were traitors or slave owners or Indian killers though obviously that makes them offensive. Maybe the problem is the whole heroic, mythological understanding of our history that statues convey.

6. So at the risk of saying something bizarre: I find myself increasingly opposed to the very idea of statues. While perhaps inevitable, the impulse to implant a heroic understanding of our past on to the landscape is unhelpful, especially to us, right now.

7. It inhibits a reckoning with the complexity of our past that we desperately need to have. But it also traps us — imperfect humans facing present challenges — in an unhelpful dialogue with heroic caricatures.

8. Even when the people represented in that heroic narrative are people I genuinely admire, that narrative leaves us in the present inevitably lacking, hopelessly inadequate, merely human, by comparison.

9. But of course the heroic figures were human and imperfect just like us. And while imperfect, we are capable not lacking — just as capable as anyone represented in those statues. And we are faced with unprecedented challenges that may require freeing ourselves from that past.