This is the narrative I composed when I returned from my 7 a.m. walk:
Early this morning I walked down Monument Avenue. I had been there earlier on the Sunday after the first few demonstrations. Today I wanted to see what had happened to the Davis statue and also to see how things had developed in general. When I got to the Lee Monument, I was stopped in my tracks. As it stands now with the graffiti reaching higher than I could have imagined, it had been repurposed as a piece of living art. But what moved me the most was the array of signs, photographs with biographies of police victims, that had been spaced all around the base of the monument and the perimeter of the circle. There are names you will recognize and others probably known only to their families. Many were marked with flowers. Each individual was worthy of remembering but taken as a group, the effect was staggering. Every school child and government official should walk by those portraits. Only a heart of stone would not be moved.
Yes the statue needs to go but right now, what stands in that circle is the most powerful piece of art I have seen.
Fascinating to see how the protesters were able to repurpose the stature and turn it into something it clearly hadn't been intended to be, but seems fitting.
