The debate over whether or not “Redskins” is an offensive team name or not has reached a fever pitch. And it’s not just the Washington D.C. NFL team that’s feeling the heat. Now an upstate New York school district has chosen to strike the Redskins team name down for their local high school sports.
This week, the Lancaster School Board voted unanimously to eliminate the nickname and mascot, insisting that it was a “symbol of ethnic stereotyping” that they could no longer abide. The move has already drawn praise from The National Congress of American Indians, the Oneida Indian Nation, and everyone else who thinks that life is better when we censor speech. In other words, every liberal in America.
Why is it so hard for these idiots to see that the name is meant to engender respect? Do they really think anyone is still throwing around the term “redskins” as a derogatory term? This is 2015, not 1815. When we use Native Americans as sports mascots, we do so because they conjure up images of bravery, fierce warriors, and a never-say-die attitude. Strength. Courage. These are positive attributes, are they not? It’s not like we see that name and start laughing. Well, not yet anyway. You don’t see anyone calling their sports team the Liberals, do you? Of course not, because they would be laughed off the field.
How did we come to decide only now that Redskins was so offensive? Is it because we’re suddenly that much more in tune with the wishes of the American Indian? Is it because we have more information about the racist origins of the term? I don’t think so. I think it’s for the same reason it’s now considered obscene to celebrate the life of Christopher Columbus. At some point in the last couple of decades – and it really only gained steam in the last five years – we decided that we were ashamed of our nation’s history.
Well, it’s time to get over it.
There’s not a country on this planet that doesn’t have some shameful deeds in their past. Every race has violence in their history. Every nation exists because they conquered someone else. Land is scarce. The strong survive. There was been war since the beginning of human civilization. The strong replace the weak. Europeans, in this instance, replaced the natives because they had better technology, germs that the natives couldn’t fight, and a system of writing that made it much easier to develop a game plan. If it was the other way around, Europeans would have been squashed or assimilated. It’s not “good” or “bad.” It just is. Someday, a conquering land with better weapons may very well do it again, and the land we call America will become something else. Will those conquerors fret in later years about their misdeeds? Probably. Maybe that’s just another quirk of human nature.
Or maybe this politically correct nonsense is just a quirk of the time we’re living in. We don’t have any real problems, so we have to make them up to feel like we have something to live for. There aren’t really any wars to protest, there isn’t any real oppression in America, and the laws are as fair as they can possibly be. So, we have to go digging around for problems. We have to invent injustice so we have something we can rage about. So we can feel like we’re making progress.
Someday soon, we’ll be once again faced with some real problems. I only hope we don’t get so caught up in the made up stuff that we forget how to deal with them.
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