There has not been a time when incredible evil has walked the earth.

But for most of it, time has made us forget its existence.

Whatever symbols it left behind have become meaningless symbols in the mists of time.

One example, Genghis Kahn and his hordes certainly qualified.
They in time ruled their world,
And those that did not obey them,
They utterly destroyed.
But that is the distant past,
There must be some monuments they left behind,
But very few even care what evil they did.

Before I was born a great evil stalked the earth.
The Nazi’s.
They destroyed armies, countries,
People such as the Jewish people, the Gypsy peoples, homosexuals.
And many more.
With great effort they were defeated.
I am sure most monuments they erected were destroyed.

But among their towering excesses,
were the extermination camps they used.
There were many times many of them,
Throughout Germany and within other countries.

The surviving people of their extermination plans
could have destroyed those places existence.
Instead they took a braver choice,
Turning them into memorials for the people who died there.
Not wanting to forget for eternity, that such evil exists.

And of course must be defeated every time.
It is better for people to continue to confront evil and make it blink,
A remembrance others notice what they are doing.

In 1967 when I was in Austria, studying German,
one day our school made an excursion to one such camp.
It was not one of the famous names,
But that visit made an impression that remains with me.

There was a swimming pool outside the camp, they informed us guards kept sharks within.
Inside the compound of the camp were incredibly beautiful monuments from peoples all over the world, to remember what happened there.
There were showers with fake shower heads, replaced with gas noels.
There were ovens to dispose of the dead,
Too many memories to recall of them.

 But I was there, and learned a lesson that has lasted.

Within our own Countries history,
Evil had occurred many times.
And as the times changed what were erected as monuments to those evils have been left behind until this day.

Humans ascribe meaning to everything.
It can be good, at the same time others can see it as bad.
It is not wrong to do this.

However the stronger answer is to keep those monuments
As reminders of what became wrong in time,
And then let it instruct us to be better.

Stronger people would use the reminders of the past,
To become a better people.

Tearing down monuments is an attempt to hide the evil that remains within.

 Facing those evils is a much stronger response.