New Orleans has been cleansed of all evil. Yesterday, the last of four confederate monuments was removed from public view. The city is now rejoicing in its purity and goodness.

Right.

Since April, the city of New Orleans has removed a monument to a white-supremacist uprising, and statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, General P.G.T. Beauregard, and General Robert E. Lee. All but Robert E. Lee were removed under the cover of darkness, with workers wearing body armor and face-masks to hide their identity. Surreal.

But really, is New Orleans’ confederate past what most people think of when they plan their trips to The Big Easy? Let’s be honest, it’s the French Quarter and Bourbon Street, where the only tension that exists is whether or not to lift your shirt to score some sweet Mardi Gras beads. The irony of NOLA taking a moral stance against anything is quite amusing.

But who doesn’t love New Orleans as she is? She is beignets and Pat O’s Hurricanes. She’s Marie Laveau and the Delta Queen. She’s the streetcar line that rambles past Audubon Park, and alligators at the city zoo. She’s shrimp etouffee, jambalaya, and boiled crawfish, and Abita Purple Haze. She’s the Garden District where aspiring architecture students struggle to learn perspective. And she’s the muddy Mississippi that encircles the city like a big sloppy hug.

So what has the removal of this statues accomplished? Reconciliation with our nation’s slaveholding past? Broad spectrum racial healing? A unified front for promotion of diversity? Satisfactory appeasement of the reparations crowd? A robust economy for a city mired in poverty? A better education for New Orleans’ nearly all-black pubic school students? Humility on the part of the corrupt elites that run the city like their own invitation-only backroom poker game? No, just a lot of back-slapping and self-congratulations for accomplishing nothing concrete for the real problems that plague New Orleans.

Removing these monuments is disconcerting and unsettling. What will go in their place, or will an empty spot remain? Will people 130 years from now look back on us and think, “What hideously irrelevant people”?

There is certainly no healing at present, more so exacerbation of the divide. But over time the new wounds of disregard will be forgotten. And so long as we don’t think about our past, we can fool ourselves that we are the virtuous ones who always know best.