Speak Out On Healing at City Commission August 28 (Feast of Saint Augustine)

Come speak out and support healing on Monday, August 28th at St. Augustine City Commission, on item 10B on the agenda later that night.
August 28th is the Feast of Saint Augustine, the 452nd anniversary of Pedro Menendez de Aviles seeing land here, which he claimed for the Spanish King on Sept4ember 8, 1565.
This is a time for healing and heroes.
It's our town and our time, and let's share a common purpose: healing, and history, the bread and butter on the table of so many local families here in Our Nation's Oldest City.
In Atlanta, uninformed protesters recently defaced a beautiful peace monument, thinking it was Confederate!
Be calm, people. Be kind. Be not afraid. Listen to each other.
Our 1872 widows' monument to MInorcan war dead in the Civil War was a comfort to generations, whose family members did not come back. These are the names of the ancestors of our friends, neighbors and coworkers on that monument. Local St. Augustine names, not a mass-produced "statue."
Let's not disturb or dishonor the memory of their ancestors. Let's not intentionally offend people.
But let's listen, learn, reflect and add cool new monuments, as we did in 2011 -- two striking monuments to civil rights foot soldiers and to heroic Andrew Young in the Plaza (Slave Market Square), despite controversial longtime former City Manager William Barry Harriss' trying to obstruct them with false statements to Commission in December 2005 that only "Spanish colonial history" was allowed there in the square.
While residents had to raise money for six years for the foot soldiers monument, at least the City provided a base, under new management (City Manager John Patrick Regan, P.E.). And the City paid for the cool monument to Ambassador Andrew Young there (designed by gifted local landscape architect Jeremy Marquis).
Let's add a monument in the Plaza to the Union war dead from St. Augustine (including African-Americans), as suggested by Prof. Thomas Graham.
Lets place a monument in Emancipation Park, where local residents first learned of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
Let's place monuments where documented local lynchings took place.
Let's work with UF and Governor Scott on renaming Loring Park the Loring-Kennedy Park, in honor of KKK-busting local hero Stetson Kennedy.
Let's add a monument to slavery, which began in St. Augustine on September 8, 1565, with the Menendez landing.
How about a sculpture of a slave family being separated by slave-sellers? And how about a seated group tableau sculpture of Dr. Robert Hayling, Stetson Kennedy, Barbara Vickers sitting on a park bench, talking about the future and taking it all in, with room for you to sit with them and contemplate our progress since 1565? The group statute could gaze at the monument to Civil War General William Wing Loring, who was recommended by William Tecumseh Sherman to work for Egypt as a General and who toured President and former General U.S. Grant and his wife around Egypt (and was saluted at his funeral by Union and Confederate veterans in NYC and St. Augustine (where they shared a week-long camp.),
Let's promote healing, as Lincoln did, and as our Civil War veterans did.
Let's practice addition, not subtraction.
Let's remember our history -- all of it -- "warts and all" as Lincoln would say.
Let's not divide our community.
Let's multiply the opportunities to teach brotherhood and sisterhood.
How about a large national civil rights museum in St. Augustine, like in Memphis and Atlanta, as part of the St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore?
How about amending Florida law to include K-12 civil rights education, with Florida fourth graders coming here to St. Augustine to learn about civil rights?
(Mississippi did it under former Governor Haley Barbour, who supported a $50 million civil rights museum).
This is for your grandchildren, and their grandchildren.
Let's get this right.
Peace.
Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
St. Augustine lives between hope and history. Be grateful for the chance to promote healing.
It's up to each of us.
As Gandhi said, "Be the change that you want to see in the world."