Objecting to replacing one completely meaningless name with another.

People are funny with the symbols they raise to iconic status and how they try to get vicarious prestige from things they didn't do.

Esp. when it's all about control and power in the public space. Bodes poorly, all that struggling for power and victory masked by foolish claims of principle.

We've had oppression of Man by Man. Looks like next up is oppression of Man by Man.

I went to Robert E Lee High School and there was no controversy about the Confederate name in the 70s & 80s. But once somebody brought the topic up, it made sense to rename it to reflect the values of the current community as it's evolved (and start building new traditions). The name to me has different connotations than that of the Secession defender, but it was time to let that go. Certainly it wasn't as bad as the name Jeff Davis High School in a majority-black part of town. Even in my teen years I thought that was pretty fucked up.

People of course feel threatened by the pulling down of their traditional & institutions. When the school board started considering renaming the highly respected Sidney Lanier Middle School, there was a huge outcry. Sidney Lanier was conscripted into the Confederate army as a private and never expressed support for slavery or segregation. His claim to fame was as a poet with a strong humanist message in the late 19th C. But still, the ideology of renaming every school named after a Confederate demanded that even the name of a private draftee needed to be purged. Lanier is one of the top middle schools in the country and the loss of that brand would be a blow when there's not outcry among the faculty, students, or parents to rebrand the institution.

It's complicated. You can't build a culture of respect on the bones of disrespect, but that disrespect cuts both ways. Solutions have to be balanced; otherwise there's a psychological violence to them. I hope Prince William County (a philosophically anti-American name if ever I heard one) handles this transition wisely and with an inclusive mindset for all residents there.