To the editor:

Stephan Brigidi, the man who publicly recognized the privilege of his skin color and male bits, who wants others to recognize their white male privilege, is back with a new scam. Having admitted his station in life was due to his privilege, this revelation was oddly not enough for him to divest himself of the ill-gotten assets his privilege allowed him to acquire.

It seems public preening of brightly colored social justice feathers while virtue signaling was atonement enough. What fresh hypocrisy comes with the new Fatima?

Brigidi wants a monument to perpetual guilt on town land (“We must acknowledge our town’s history with a peaceful gesture,” Feb. 17). Having flagellated himself, he now wants the town to do so by focusing on one moment in time and no others and confront its role in slavery. We already have that in town in spades.

Kindergartners are taught A is for apple, G is for guilt or grievance and S is for slavery. Each successive grade reinforces and expands the student’s odyssey into guilt, inculcating loathing of self, family, culture and country. Then there’s Linden Place, a monument to mans’ inhumanity to man with slavery tours. Bristol already has physical and fixed monuments to guilt rising up out of the ground and walking all over it. Brigidi’s proposed monument is as divisive and superfluous as it is devious.

Brigidi would have you believe the proposed monument would be innocuous. Don’t bet on it. His proposal is a Trojan Horse. The site of the monument would become a nexus for the aggrieved. A place for political activism, a place to harbor malice, a place to marshal the flags of the discontented before their march through the Historic District, or the end point of the same groups emanating from elsewhere.

It is not a stretch at all to see the monument grounds become a place of contrition. School children can be bussed in to watch the repentant knee walk to the monument, as the faithful do in Fatima, Portugal.

Brigidi and his cultural locusts forget the debt for American slavery has been paid in full with mountains of corpses and shattered men wrapped in blue and grey with rivers run red with blood and valleys filled with grieving mothers and widows.

Brigidi proposes immortalizing a moment of darkness, our low point. He means to use that for particular political gain. If the Town Council suddenly has a monument fetish, I propose a counter-monument. I propose a monument to a “New Birth of Freedom.” Since Brigidi suggests the town look at its role in slavery and we already do, why doesn’t Bristol immortalize its role in the abolition of slavery, our high point?

A monument could be fashioned in the likeness of a local Union soldier. He could be depicted in uniform, frozen in action at the moment the final blow of his ax chops through a chain laid over a stump.

Of course the council could also leave things as they are now and simply deny Brigidi his fake Fatima.

George P. Cooper
48-A Sherman Ave.