Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for January 17, 2016

Sam, Walden had the first integrated fraternity in the nation.

“Thank you sir may I have another?”

one man’s fraternity pledge is another man’s slave

Or an example of “good” parenting? No mollycoddling back in the day.

Must’ve been a Rhodes scholar.

This is the first I’ve heard of Elias Walden. I guess he was kind of like Jebediah Springfield, or what Jubilation T. Cornpone was to Dogpatch.

Google whitesboro seal in NY. Classic.

It’s heritage, not hate.

The times they are a changin’. Again.

The all time champion for cultural blindness, I think, was the Onion “Open Letter to a Starving Child” by some guy who urged an Indian street child to just come to America, and if he didn’t have money for a ticket, just “put it on the plastic.”

Sounds like something rMoney really would have said.

I guess the statue is open for interpretation.

Um, before you go off on a rant about a comic strip, get your characters straight. That’s not Mike, it’s B.D. as Sam’s dad.

Isn’t that the same thing?

A monument to the acceptance of bullying to become part of a group….

Hmm, and Cortez and Pizarro “saved souls” for the church by killing all the natives that resisted the stealing of their land, and of course, gold. Acts from Europeans goes back way beyond Walden.

I don’t believe the children inherit the sins of their parents. But, it is important that children recognize and are honest about those sins.

I agree that much of what goes on on today’s campuses is anti-intellectual – the offense-free zones, the refusal to hear the other side. But are you saying that Sam’s interpretation of the statue is imaginary,and that B.D. is right , that Walden is captured hazing a fraternity pledge?

Both the dueling narratives here posit that there’s a second person in the statue, either a slave being beaten or a pledge being hazed, and both posit that Walden is the one doing the attacking. B.D. is no liberal, and he sees it. Upon what evidence do you base your belief that there is no second person, that this is merely the statue of a man with a cane or a stick and both Sam and B.D. have imposed a second person being attacked upon an innocuous tableaux? Other than your conviction that such a statue could not possibly exist in a comic strip?

Well, can’t argue with that logic.

Hmmmm, could it be so on purpose? Just saying. People like her are not so uncommon, right?

No, I’m not DJDeSpain, but it’s just that what you wrote made no sense the way it was written, and this was highlighted by getting the character’s name and background wrong.

Dears, after going through the comments (and replying to them too much), could a native speaker please explain the last sentence in the strip to the rest of us? (no trolling, I also googled a little and still don’t understand the meaning)

NG,Please remember not al fraternities did such things. That said, I remember a pledge left chained to a cypress tree near UF. They were too drunk to remember where they left him. When hunters found his remains, they could see he had dug a hole for swamp water to seep into, eaten all the bark on the tree as far up as he could reach, probably lived for several weeks waiting for help which never came. . . . . . . As to the imaginary statue I’ve never seen: Being a kindly soul, Elias Walden’s beating back the dogs attacking the poor refugee from southern plantation horrors.

Aaaah, yes thank you, it all becomes clear now. I love seeing two birds killed.

Oh my God, but I guess I should not be surprised that Trudeau actually buys into the PC crap on the nations campuses.