There is a concerted effort across this nation to destroy any historical markers that some people may find offensive.  We are tearing down statues of Christopher Columbus and General Robert E. Lee – and – even removing their names from public schools.

In Tulsa, the city council is considering changing “Brady Street” to “Reconciliation Way” because Tate Brady, the street’s namesake, is said to have been associated with the Sons of the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) during his younger years.

However, according to the Oklahoma Historical Society, Tate Brady was also one of the pioneers, who, in 1890, helped build the city of Tulsa.   He was married to Rachel Davis, of a prominent Claremore Cherokee family, and was adopted into the Cherokee Tribe, and became a strong advocate for their tribal claims against the government bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.

In addition, after Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state in 1907, Tate Brady was the first named member of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and he, along with Will Rogers and other prominent Oklahoma businessmen hired a train at their own personal expense and traveled back east to promote the City of Tulsa.

But in today’s world, some people find these historical figures to be offensive, and they are trying to eliminate them from public view, erase them from people’s minds, and rewrite history so that it will be more to their liking.

If they are successful in this endeavor, they will have destroyed the factual evidence of our historical past.   In other words, how will anyone be able to prove that something really happened (the Jewish Holocaust, the Civil War, and slavery for example), if the physical evidence has been destroyed, and the minds of the people wiped clean?  In essence, they are erasing their very own existence.

As Edmund Burke once said: “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.”