Abraham Lincoln waged a gruesome war to preserve this nation. It makes a powerful symbolic statement of our country’s demise when his statue is facedown in the mud.
In the past, when respiratory viruses hit, leaders (including in the medical field) saw it as their duty to stem panic and to encourage people to go on with their lives as much as possible.
Banning anyone’s political speech, left or right, is wrong. Once the speech of one party is significantly constrained or even erased, any speech opposed to the powerful will be steadily eliminated.
Without understanding the past, we cannot preserve our hard-won freedoms. I hope that Americans are still brave enough to oppose eradicating history, and that the extraordinary story of Abraham Lincoln will live on.
When all this is over, one of the key problems to resolve will be: how to deal with viruses and save lives without doing unacceptably massive damage to our whole society.