Stop the Park Service from canceling William Penn

UPDATE: National Park Service has dropped its ridiculous plan to “rehabilitate” Welcome Park.

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Well, I thought maybe the Woke fever was breaking, but it seems I was wrong.

That’s the feeling I got when reading that the National Park Service is floating an insulting proposal to “rehabilitate”  the vest pocket park created in 1982 to honor William Penn, and the 300th anniversary of Pennsylvania.

It plans to “rehabilitate” the park, called an open-air museum, by removing a statue of William Penn.

The Big Idea, per the press release posted on the NPS website, is to “provide a more welcoming, accurate, and inclusive experience.”

That the park becomes more “inclusive” by excluding the white man person for whom the park is named could be described as Newspeak, originated by George Orwell in his grim novel “1984.” “Inclusion is Exclusion” joins Orwell’s “War is Peace,”  and “Freedom is Slavery.”

It’s not like the statue of Penn — a scaled-down version of the 36-foot-tall Alexander Milne Calder masterpiece atop City Hall — was a statue of some random Civil War general that might have been erected more than 100 years ago as a show of defiance. Penn was a progressive, who guaranteed religious freedom under his flag. His design for his City of Brotherly Love was inspired.

Welcome Park was erected with pride slightly more than 40 years ago, but seems to have run afoul of the current Woke trend emanating from the far left, determined to undermine our history and traditions, and sow hate.

The Society Hill park on 2nd between Chestnut and Walnut, the NPS admits, is located on the site of Penn’s home, and is named after the ship, Welcome, that brought him to the new world. It was his home, but it is OK to evict him.

The proposed “rehabilitation” — no person is given blame credit for it — was “developed in consultation with representatives of indigenous tribes.” The press release does not say if any other special interest groups, or historians, were consulted.

And here it is fair to mention that President Joe Biden’s “historic” appointee to head the Interior Department, which includes NPS, is Deb Haaland, is a Native American. Is she exercising a grudge against American originators? [Full disclosure: Although NPS does not mention it, Penn held slaves. So did some Indian tribes.]

The underlying concept, says NPS, is to create an expanded interpretation of the Native American history of Philadelphia. No problem with that.

But why does that require the dismantling of the statue of the state’s founder, even erasing the Penn timeline on one of the walls?

The word I used was “erase.”

It could just have easily been canceled.

Especially unfair for a rare man who was known for treating Native Americans with respect. Fishtown’s Penn Treaty Park is testament to that. Surely Native Americans could have been added to Welcome Park, with hardly any complaint.

I sent an email to Mayor Cherelle Parker’s spokesman to learn if the mayor knew of this proposal, and whether she favored it. I got no response before deadline.

I also left a message with a NPS spokesman asking the cost, whose idea this was, were non Native Americans consulted, and how does excluding Penn contribute to inclusion?  No answer before deadline.

Here’s the good news: It ain’t a done deal and NPS is soliciting public comment, but only though its website: https://parkplanning.nps.gov/ 

You have until the 21st. Do not delay. Make your voice heard. Spread this around.