The Confederate statue removal debate is rearing its ignorant head again. Last summer a group of ideological UNC students brought down a Confederate statue named Silent Sam. Despite clearly breaking the law, I don’t recall reading anything about just punishment.

Now the issue has become what to do with Silent Sam. It has been proposed that Silent Sam, along with some other artifacts, be housed in a newly constructed building somewhere on the UNC campus. You know, kind of like a museum.

Apparently that won’t do. These student UNC “revolutionaries” don’t want the building or Silent Sam on campus at all. To make their point, they are staging rallies and carrying signs that say they are against things like the KKK, cops, white supremacy and fascism.. These my-way-or-the-highway children won’t be happy until Silent Sam is melted down and turned into coinage, at which time they’ll probably fight over who gets the coins.

But who is Silent Sam? He is definitely not an egomaniacal lunatic hellbent on total control or world domination. Like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, he is just someone defending something against a perceived threat.

Was he defending slavery? Maybe, but most Southerners didn’t own slaves. Was he defending his farm? Was he defending his family? Did he have either one?

Silent Sam is the most benign of all possible monuments, and yet he still got toppled. Shame on UNC.

—Allan Gilmour

Salisbury