Art's Eternal Provocation. What Led Dr. Sean Morrison to Destroy a Neighbor's Statue of Christopher Columbus?

Plenty of art is designed to provoke a response. One might even suggest that the more impassioned a response a piece of art elicits, the more effective is the work. Judging by the mass destruction of public art this summer across American cities by spoiled brats in the throes of cancel culture, apparently today's youth are more sensitive to art's power than their elders are or were. 

If given a thousand guesses as to what piece of art had been destroyed during 2020's Marxist Summer of Destruction and Inchoate Demands, your friends at Messy Times would never have come up with this example.

On June 30th, 55-year-old Dr. Sean Morrison of Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York, stole and destroyed a bronze sculpture of Christopher Columbus, which was sitting in a niche in his co-op lobby, having been placed there by a neighbor and fellow co-op owner, John Cartafalsa, a 91-year-old WW2 veteran and retired attorney. The statue had been there for 30 years, so what drove Dr. Morrison to steal a neighbor's statue and destroy it?

We'll find out on December 8th when he faces trial for petit larceny, but what he has said to date is the combination of George Floyd's death in May and seeing patients die of the Wuhan Virus made him angry at Christopher Columbus. We hope he is forced to explain to the rest of us who fail to see any connection between those three things what made him destroy an elderly WW2 veteran's statue, which had been given to him in 1957 when he graduated from law school by Sicilian family members.