| | | quote | Originally posted by Doug85GT:
It is even worse than that. The Statue of Liberty was a gift to commemorate 100th birthday of the nation and the abolition of slavery. That is why there are broken chains at the foot of the statue. The sonnet, The New Colossus, was a fund raiser to build the pedestal for the statue and has nothing to do with its purpose. Somehow that poem usurped the original meaning of the statue. It is the Statue of Liberty, not the Mother of Exiles. The poem is a lie. |
|
We almost agree. With the way we've been proceeding, the entire statue is a lie.
You've hyperfocused on one aspect of the and missed the overall meaning. The statue was meant to celebrate the US' liberty and democracy, and it's spread across the world (get it? She's holding the torch out to the rest of the world?), while commemorating the US' abolition of slavery. I agree entirely it was not expressly meant as a symbol of immigration...until the US made it so by tying it and the poem together inarguably and officially. It didn't usurp the meaning, it extended it in a purposeful way.
So back to the point I was making: If we're being honest we should either scrub that part out and be open that we'd rather import new rich foreign overlords than give hungry people looking for an opportunity a chance, or just ditch the idea of the statue altogether because even if you want to call what's happened over the last few months "liberty" I don't know if there's enough apologetics to claim we're still openly extending it to the world. Maybe we could replace the torch with something more appropriate...like a whoopie cushion or a Diet Coke can?
