Moonbeam Brown and the Redskins.....

"The time has come, the walrus said, to speak of many things..." L.Carroll

I don't mind Columbus Day, even the misinformation about Columbus 'discovering' America. Eventually, even the most mundane high school history courses do make it clear that other europeans were actually here earlier. 

And the nonsense that Columbus somehow 'exploited' the aboriginal inhabitants of the American continent is nothing but  progressive liberal revisionism and, as with most revisionist history, totally incorrect. 

As a matter of fact, this inane assumption about the myth of the so-called 'Native' American is part of the process that has kept aboriginal Americans from fully participating in what has become known as the American Dream. 

I do blame the governments immediately following our Civil War for their genocidal tactics against primarily the western tribes and the reservation system that followed that  halted the genocide but excluded the Indians, as they had become commonly known, from inclusion in our fledgling democracy. 

The Indian Wars, as they were known, were over by the 1880's and here we are, 145 years later dithering like a pack of fools over semantics.  

Many  people in the USA claim American Indian in their ancestry and they are fully assimilated, while a relative handful of western Indians were confined to reservations, ostensibly for their own protection, but, somehow, seemed to end up much like animals in a zoo. 

As a matter of fact, tourists are invited, even inveigled, you might say, to drive through these reservations as they might drive through any free range zoo, encouraged to take photos and purchase souvenirs, while never actually getting far away from the safety of their vehicles.

I’m just a country boy, a long way from being the brightest bulb on the tree, but even I can see what the practice of exclusion has done to the remnants of a conquered people.

No one complains about the University of Notre Dame being known as The Fighting Irish. Someone might complain if they were known as The Drunken Irish but, then again, maybe not.

Sports teams, named after various and sundry Indian Tribes were done so in honor of what was considered to be brave and honorable.  The Redskins, of which Gov. Jerry ‘Moonbeam’ Brown is so disparaging was never meant to be an insult. Nobody names sports teams after coward or losers.  I just have to wonder where in the world is the common sense that Americans are supposed to have….Gone with the wind, I suppose….