By Christopher Ryan

So some geniuses celebrated American freedom on Saturday by attacking a statue of Frederick Douglass. Nope, this was not in the Rebel South and it wasn’t a bunch of Confederate wannabes chanting, “The South will rise again!” This was in Rochester, New York (yeah, way up the left-leaning north), on the sight of a famous speech given by the abolitionist on July 4th.

The chronology is pretty easy to assume. Some freedom-loving whiteboys enraged by the recent destruction of American heroes of the slave era decided to get some payback by turning this …

… into this.

Probably seemed only fair after all the white guy statues that have been pulled down and desecrated and otherwise “removed from our proud history!” But the problem with that logic is the assumption that all history is proud. Nah. Never the case. Go over Germany and count the number of official Nazi statues. Or go to Africa and take the “Great Kidnappers and Slave Traders of Our Past” tour. You can’t because other countries keep the darker parts of their history in their history books.

We don’t. We keep honest accounts of our history out of our textbooks and instead erect statues to slavers and Confederate Civil War “heroes” and take revenge when those racists are torn down. And we seek justice by attacking monuments to those who dared to move this nation forward.

What’s next? How long until every statue in America is torn down or desecrated? When are we going after tributes to those evil bastards Lincoln and Jefferson? Let’s tear them suckers down! And then, when all the stone and metal historical monuments are ruined, let’s turn on each other. Yeah! Let’s get those Republican bums and Democratic mongrels, those Conservative clowns, and Liberal leper’s! Then let’s kill journalists and hunt down gays and cage Muslims and turn our whole country into this book…

I wrote it as a parody, a dark comedy exploring the near future as a warning of where we could wind up if we continue along the nightmarish path we are on. And then elements of this fiction started coming true to varying degrees. A Simple Rebellion is becoming less a dark comedic parody and more a desperate plea for all of us to take a breath and consider what we are doing to each other, who we are allowing to form our thoughts, and, most importantly, where we go from here.

God Bless America. Please.