Names, okay. But where does it stop? If I donate to a non-profit I want the money to go to the mission (in this case, bird conservation). Not towards indulgences by paying off DEI administrators or diverting funds to unrelated "social justice" causes.
Thanks for pointing this out. This is what the author missed. He did a good job sketching out the argument for why people want the name changed. The argument against change he made sound like is only about losing brand recognition or salty older folks who think caring about names is "stupid."
No, actually the more significant argument against the name change campaign is due to the propensity of woke activism to shift any and all missions toward woke causes in the name of "diversity, equity, and inclusion." Many people who care about bird conservation want the mission to remain on birds.
Also, he did touch on this point, but it bears repeating: many people don't believe a cultural revolution is going to end well for most people. They'd rather learn from history than erase it. The Mao mindset is not good for the cause of true justice.
Well said, Leah. If you carry the rationale of the name changers to its logical conclusion, no one who's ever done [name your sin] is fit to be remembered, regardless of what societal contribution they may have made. If we're going to cancel and tear down statues of Jefferson and U.S. Grant, and rename the Audubon Society, are we going to hold other people and individuals to same standard?
For example, should the Democratic Party rename itself because so many of its members embraced segregation for 100 years after the Civil War? That chapter in Seattle -- are they going to push to change the name of their state from Washington? Should George Floyd Elementary School be renamed because he committed aggravated robbery on two occasions, along with twice committing crimes using a gun?
This whole thing seems very selective, as well as very Maoist.
Wait! You just suggested another way in which birding is . . . problematic: they keep labeling birds as male and female entirely on the basis of external markers like plumage, and behavior, and, you know, reproductive physiology.
No one has ever asked whether that male cardinal - brightly colored and singing loudly to mark its territory and attract a mate - perhaps *feels* like a female on the inside.
We laugh, but there is plenty of observed evidence that birds fill certain evolutionary roles, regardless of their sex. What we call gendered roles (I.e: hens and cocks), is performed regardless of sex if there are no biological males, or biological females to fulfill the role. I see it every day with my chickens, and I’ve seen it for decades with my parrots. And we’ve all heard the stories of the penguin pairs who are the same sex, as well as countless other avian examples. Birds do not conform to the Human social construct of gender if their survival necessitates it, but also they don’t give a fig what we think anyways.
Until the egregious example of the National Basketball Association begins to diversify and play little people, I cannot in good conscience abide by DEI in the Audubon Society!
The obvious goal of DEI is to demonize Caucasians, wherever they are, in and out of every institution. It has risen to the top priority in the land. Its end goal is obvious - the end of Western Civilization, and the end goal is now in sight.
But they already have a DEI NBA - it’s called the WNBA, it plays in arenas 1/5 the size of NBA arenas, and they still can’t even sell out playoff games.
And hey my kids grew up watching Sesame Street and loved “Auntie Audubon” Big Bird’s aunt….Thinking about how traumatized they will be if poor “Auntie Audubon” is cancelled keeps me up all night worrying about the harm that will cause
It DOESN'T stop, comrade! The revolution is ongoing. The struggle continues. Do not grow weary and do not waste bullets when hammers work just as well.
NARO: SORRY-I'M (FOR WHATEVER REASON) ONLY ALLOWED TO POST IN REPLY.
Should George Floyd have died? Nope. But he was a criminal who did dope (under the influence at the time of his death) and had committed some pretty outrageous crimes. Should the conduct of the police officers involved have been examined and adjudicated? Yep-and It was. Did BLM, the DNC and the MSM weaponize the incident and exploit it for personal gain, subvert the justice system and reduce the trial to a witch hunt? Yep. Did the BLM and its leadership publicly announce themselves to be trained Marxist's while personally profiting from the Floyd death? Yep. Have Black American's coast to coast questioned the use of BLM donation's? Absolutely. Did BLM rhetoric contribute to and encourage the rioting that cost lives and destroyed billions in property during the Covid lockdowns? Did the DNC encourage the riot's, conflate criminality with revolution and does it continue to encourage and exploit the chaos for its own purposes? Yep. Has the BLM, the DNC and corporate controlled media continued to play the race card and taken every opportunity to use race hatred as a wedge to divide American's? Of course. Did the Democratic Party found the Ku Klux Clan? Yep. Is BLM a racist organization? Has the BLM, the DNC and the feminist driven D.E.I. commissariat so infected, distorted and emotionally charged the American national dialogue with racist and sexist rhetoric that it makes it almost impossible for American's to objectively discuss any topic of serious financial, social or cultural concern? Is that the point? Yep.
I own binoculars, provide a constant water source and put out almost a ton of bird seed each year. Living on the edge of a National Forest I can see that birds, all living creatures (we also have puma, bear and elk) are under stress and threat. (Ask Black kid's in D.N.C. controlled Chiraq.) Streams that once ran year round now only flow in spring. Enter the forest and you can feel the hunger. I'm not a member of the Audubon Society.
We had Audubon print's on our walls when I was a child. The man was a major talent and a conservationist far ahead of his time. The spontaneity of Audubon Society membership in keeping the organization alive is commendable. The conscious display of concern and open proclamation of our connection to nature and our responsibility for its preservation cannot be questioned. Why and who would risk destruction of such a worthwhile endeavor?
The journalist was correct in reporting on the situation. It matters. But, as in every other heart rending report of this type it is merely, like snakebite, a report on the slow spread of poison in the lymph. The senseless cancellation of worthy lives. The de-platforming of yet another truthful voice. Journalist's berated and abused at the congressional hearing. The lockdown. The perpetual lie and the cover-up. All.
The more important point is theat Floyd died while in custody for alleged criminal activity, and resisting arrest. He died because he was resisting arrest. He did NOT die because his life was so important it was worth saving.
Wishful thinking. Their most recent published Form 990 shows they have $590 million in net assets, having made $48million and $31 million in the prior two fiscal years. The CEO made almost $900k in the most recent year.
Like many non-profits who prey on stupid people, they are a scam.
Where does this PC/Woke crap end? Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and almost every civilization on Earth had slaves. Does this mean we should empty the museums of the world of pre 20th century artifacts? Turn all of the ancient statuary into gravel and destroy all artwork from these slave owning societies?
Do these tyrannical assholes want to rewrite history, burn all books that mention slaves, Shakespeare, Huckleberry Finn, Gone With The Wind, The Bible and hundreds of thousand of ancient texts and all literature that not only write about slavery but those works that came from slave owning societies?
Again I ask, where does it end?
If I weren't so old I'd move to Ticino Switzerland and sit on my patio admiring the glory of the Alps and drink good wine out of a paper sack.
The most ironic moment was when a few days ago the NYT published an article about black people who were enslaved by Oklahoma Native Americans (of course, the article was about the rights of those people somehow being trampled by police trying to enforce laws). I was like: wait a minute, so a major VICTIM group has victimized another major VICTIM group? That blows my intersectional fuses, it’s too difficult to fathom! So everybody does it, just like the West African black kingdoms of W Africa, who were begging the British as late as the 1870s to resume the “mutually beneficial” slave trade? Isn’t that supposed to happen only because “racism is in white people’s DNA”?
It ends with the total and complete appropriation of those cultures and their proponents marginalized and oppressed. This is vengeance pure and simple.
I almost gave up on this article upon the assertion: "Simply to say he was a man of his time and bore no responsibility on slavery is historically and intellectually a mistake."
Audubon DIED before the Civil War. He grew up in a time and place when slaveholding was considered completely acceptable (as it had been for thousands of years of human history prior to that point). Expecting the man to reject what was normal in his world is not merely unreasonable, it is outrageously unreasonable.
The ironic thing is that Leftists constantly scream for lower standards for POCs because the "systemically racist" world in which they live means they can't be expected to do any better. Progressives want POC to be able to steal, assault, and murder without consequences, because it's "not fair" to punish them for behavior that is supposedly "caused" by racism.
And yet white people of the past were supposedly unaffected by the social environment they grew up in. They should have KNOWN--say Leftists--that slavery was evil, and they should have gotten rid of it AND "systemic racism" in their own era. And the failure to have done so makes them automatically too evil to have their names spoken ever again.
This is one of the most interesting fallacies I have seen mentioned! The idea that we have to give current people a pass because society is holding them back. But people of the past can't have that same pass for being held back by their society. Excellent.
Six hundred thousand NORTHERNERS, who did not grow up surrounded by slave-owners, but rather by Abolitionists. And although you might find it uncomfortable, chances are that most of them who didn't want black people to be slaves anymore nevertheless did not want black people to be their neighbors.
If Northerners were so wonderful, the former slaves who migrated north would not have faced persistent racism in their new cities.
Of course the Union soldiers were volunteers. This was why there were no draft rioits in New York and no Irish folk songs about coming to America to be free and being impressed (Enslaved) off the boat and crippled in a war that had fuck all to do with them. Shining city on a hill or a country and people, whatever their political bent, that has been shit since the first Thanksgiving?
Presentism - -seeks to judge the past by today's standards. Basically it is following this Orwellian mantra: Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.
Contextualization seeks to explain the past was a different country and put the problematic into context.
"History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right."
Slightly different now tho. We could say that we have an endless present of perpetual Victimhood, but that rests on a never receding past of slavery. The chains rattle today as loudly as they did in 1863 and they will never stop rattling.
All the seemingly-unrelated "movements" are in reality pieces of the giant puzzle called, variously, Communist Revolution, One World Government, Elite Totalitarianism.
It's quite revealing to read the Enemy's literature; destruction of the nuclear family, destruction of tradition, destroying and rewriting history are all parts, and so is "presentism" - the idea that all history, traditional thought, and principles are relics of the past; that those people were stupid and unenlightened (not like us, who are f'ing geniuses), and we have to eliminate from our lives all their knuckle-dragging ideas.
'Speciesism' is old hat in the literature of environmental ethics. It's an unnecessarily contentious and somewhat cringe-inducing term that stems from a really interesting question about who or what should be given moral consideration.
Put simply, following terms suggested by Aldo Leopold, our treatment of some things is a matter of ethics, while our treatment of other things is a matter of expediency. Is there any non-arbitrary reason why only human beings should be given moral consideration?
This is a worthwhile question, one that merits some careful thought and requires a lot of nuance.
The charge of 'speciesism' is an impatient short-cut, replacing careful thought with mere name-calling and guilt by association. The implication is supposed to be that 'speciesism' is no more justifiable than racism or sexism.
Historians will want to look back & change the names of institutions named for people who owned Priuses. Those ridiculous un-battery-recyclable status symbols built on the backs of cobalt-mining children that made the leash China has us on for rare minerals like lithium even shorter. Well done. I'll take my 86 Honda Civic, of which I am the original owner, which has gotten and STILL gets 40 mpg, any day of the week.
My little girl just turned 375,000 miles the other day. I always video moments like that. I went bananas when she turned 333,333.3, lol. Anyway we are going for half a million, at which time I am going to call Honda & see what kind of accolades they want to bestow.
How cool will that be. I heard a story about a guy who drove a volkswagen 500K miles & they gave him a free one, but it could be an urban myth. Worth a try, but I'd still drive my girl.
Toyotas (and their "luxury" up-brand Lexus) are awesome. We have a 2008 FJ and 2009 RX350, both over 150K miles, and both run beautifully with the appropriate amount of maintenance :)
Audubon owned slaves. I. Don't. Care. If the Audubon Society changes its name, I will respond precisely the same way I did when the Confederate Air Force changed its name to the Commemorative Air Force or when Anheuser-Busch lost its mind: I will withdraw all monetary support. My few dollars don't mean much to these organizations, but it makes ME happy, and that's all that matters.
I'd ask you to reconsider. While I completely understand your sentiment, please consider the HUGE difference between organizations that protect wildlife versus corporations that make bad beer. If you pull your support for Audubon, it's the innocent birds and natural ecosystem that will suffer.
I’m sorry but including Christian Cooper in this story is indicative of the nature (pun intended) of this piece. This guy threatened a woman with attempting to steal her dogs and when she gave a physical description to the police, cried racism to hide behind his bad behavior. Virtue signaling with name changes is still just virtue signaling. Instead of worrying about the name and the history, maybe worry more about the birds, and perhaps about the human feces they have to ignore as they step over it. Rome is burning while Nero fiddles....
And let's not forget the most recent "Karen," Sarah Comrie who was vilified because she confronted a bunch of young black boys who tried to take the Citibike she legally rented. Another fake racial incident in which, had the boys been white, and acted like idiots, would never have been reported. In NYC - or other strongholds of leftist insanity - one fights back against a black assailant at one's peril. Just ask Daniel Penny.
Worse, the card-carrying jerk was rewarded for it with a TV Series. We all know that if the NYPD had shown up in response to "Karen's" call, they would have shrugged the whole thing off. But noooooooo, the Drama Queens of BLM / MOB JUSTICE have the useful idiots convinced that the (probably black and Hispanic) cops would have arrived guns blazing and shot him dead.
Which is ironic because I'd like to see Christian Cooper go where he put Amy Cooper.
Yeah, interviewing Cooper *seriously* was a huge indication of the non-serious nature of this article. His inappropriate behavior toward ALL dogwalkers was called out by a black dogwalker. Threats to poison people's dogs are not acceptable. The fact that anyone could take this man seriously is disturbing.
Being a progressive means sacrificing 10,000 years of human history to 50 years of utopian thinking. “Colonialism” is simply the way people lived - until a bunch of privileged brats decided their cushy, guilt ridden, elite ideas more more important then every one else’s. So disheartening...
I wonder how many of these individuals have read 1984? I’m also reminded of something Scott Peck wrote about how great evil is sometimes committed by people absolutely convinced of the righteousness of their actions. Not saying that renaming organizations is great evil, but i think that many of these self righteous individuals are completely convinced of their own virtue in doing so.
ALL evil is comitted by folk who think they are righteous, Stalin, Mao, Hitler. Hitler even thought of himself as an righteous upstanding Christian FFS.
Yes. Reading Peck’s work has motivated me to always question myself about my reactions. Self-examination is one of our best antidotes to facilitating evil ourselves.
You have hit the nail on the head except I wouldn't call it utopia. I call it fascist tyranny. For thousands of years slavery was practiced and considered moral. You cannot judge the morals of the past by the morals of today.
The tyrants on the left willfully ignore that most countries that practice the religion of peace condone slavery and have slaves. The black Muslim country of Sudan raided Christian villages, in the 20th cen. slaughtering everybody in the village except women and small children who they took as slaves.
The left worships the religion of peace and pillories anyone who criticizes it. Where is their outrage over a modern day Muslim country condoning slavery. It is easier for these whacky left wing nutz to tear down statues and organizations over something that happened in this country over 100 years ago than to condemn their Muslim heroes.
If for some reason I had a national audience and stood up and cursed Islam for having slaves, beating and killing women and throwing homosexuals off roof tops the left would curse me for being Islamophobic and ignore the facts I was presenting.
When the left can't win an argument, they change the subject and call you names, like racist or xenophobe and tear down statues or change an organization's name.
This piece made me chuckle out loud a few times. I have worked in nonprofits for 11 years and I've been following the leftist, DIE madness in the industry that is rampant and taking over missions and causing such a ruckus. It's everywhere, grab your popcorn and get Googling if you want a show - nonprofits are EATING each other from the inside out over this stuff instead of focusing on what they were really meant to do: their missions!
The Audubon name change is just one of many I am aware of that are having conversations about how their history or a name or some other innocuous piece of their organization that they dug up for some perverted attempt at prostration in the wake of George Floyd because it is perceived as "harming" marginalized communities. It doesn't cause any harm, that's absolutely ridiculous. Most people don't even know who Audubon was let alone that he owned slaves. The name had changed already because it had become synonymous with conservation. The name was redeemed through the acts of the organization in preserving nature, habitats, and bringing joy to retirees looking for bushtits all over the U.S. in a way a dead man for whom it is named cannot. Must everything be reduced to this single, small-minded contention that has to do with the fact that early America involved slavery? Someone find me a civilization that did not participate in such immoral and horrible acts...go on, I'll wait...
Everything is damned and dirty in such a narrow, reductionist narrative and frankly, it's exhausting and it distracts from REAL issues and REAL harms that are happening to marginalized communities that any nonprofit worth its salt would actually be working on. By all means, focus on changing the Audubon society's name because the namesake had slaves about 150 years ago instead of trying to stop the rise of Black on Black crime, the ever increasing high school drop out, the decreasing literary rates in fourth graders, and the epidemic of opioid deaths that are happening NOW. Great idea - you might as well go fly a kite it'll be just as effective as changing an organization's name in the fight against harms to marginalized people.
Or maybe no redemption is necessary for a bird conservation society being named after the first guy to devote his life to cataloguing and publishing all the species of birds in North America.
I think there are at least two ways of thinking about this phrase though, I’m sure there are more. These will be overly simplified.
One way, as perceived by the left, as people who are usually non-White who have been disenfranchised simply based on their ethnicity or race because of racism, or sexuality because of sexism,etc. They lack access to privileges and opportunities in life because of barriers to success, they are the victims of White supremacy or capitalism or homophobia, etc. I don’t agree with this, but that’s one way I’ve heard it explained. It’s also a Marxist approach, but who has time to get into that fun conversation?!
The other is to interpret it as anyone living on the margins of society and not benefiting from what it has provided those who are living relatively well.
Usually these communities are described outside of class terms which, I think, misses the point, and usually their unfortunate and unfair status in society is blamed on everyone else who is not living like they are.
I have read that all.of this has been framed recently in terms of racism because to do so on the basis of class does not work well here. People do not want the same things. Some people are never satisfied materially. Some people are satisfied with less materially. Some people disavow material possessions altogether. It is these post-modernists who define people by what they have as opposed to who they are. All while preaching about diversity and tolerance. I call BS.
Doesn't work well here either; the English "working class" is, always was, and always will be, deeply c/Conservative and has always acknowledged its "betters" who for the most part always acknowledeged them and kept their part of the bargain.
The franchise was widened by who? The Aristocrats with the power, then the Aristocrats and Bourgeoisie with the power, then the men with the power, then the "straight" people with the power. If the vast majority of the folk with the power hadn't wanted to extend the franchise and had wanted only to oppress, King John would be lauded as a great English Hero and not despised as a complete cunt.
Marx & Engels didn't have a clue even when they were writing.
Marx & Engels were two flea-bitten German losers who managed to create more misery, death and despair than any other political puppetmasters in history.
L. Edge - you really nailed it with the "harming" words. I've never understood how something like this is causing harm. I don't think young black men in Chicago or any other city are feeling hurt because of the Audubon society name! Maybe they're hurt because there's no real school that's worth a darn, no options, no opportunities and now...no police! You're post really struck a chord with me. Thanks for writing it.
Over the last couple of days I've been hearing about the name change for Fort Bragg. I'm wondering if even one person had driven by Fort Bragg and thought "Bragg was a racist confederate. This has ruined my day. I bet not.
The problem with most of these people who support cancellations of the past, or presentism, is they rarely ever improve the present. On the contrary, in all likelihood they’re setting us up for a terrible future.
Excellent point. How are birds better protected when the well-known name is replaced with something no one cares about? It makes no sense. People will stop donating and nothing gets better. But some people will feel personally righteous.
One is not allowed to talk about that. They were merely internalizing the white oppression that had been forced upon them... ...does make the whole reparations thing a bit messy, though...
Except that they had been enslaving people of other tribes since long before Europeans came to this continent. I guess "white oppression" is able to defy physics and travel throughout time and space.
I don't believe that they really care about any of that - black-owned slaves, white-owned slaves, black slave traders or indentured servants, like my ancestors. They just want lucre and dominance. And fame. Social Justice Warrioring seems to them like the easiest grift to get those things.
They remind me of a fellow I grew up with. Always a bully, he finally caught religion and started bullyragging all his neighbors to get "saved." In reality he was a nobody. But he desperately wanted to be Somebody. They - and he - will never get what they want.
Before any name is changed, any statue demolished, any words in a book changed, I submit that everyone voting for such changes, should be required to submit their taxes to see how much they donated to support all these minorities they are protecting.
I have often wondered why changing names, etc due to some dark history these folks uncovered in their deep research into American slave-holding history, , is going to help anyone except their own virtue signaling reputations. Noone, that I have read about, has sold their large homes - I am from Portland so know all too well about those homes - to finance low income housing : none that I know of have taken in two or three black or Native America teenagers and supported them for years in private schools so they can overcome their racist history and succeed in today's world.
When it was recently discovered that the ancestors of Angela Davis came over on the Mayflower as COLONISTS for heaven's sake, I had to laugh. Wonder if Henry Gates did a heritage history of any of these folks, he would find a slave owner. Oh THE HORROR. .
Personally I do not think they really care about that either. I truly believe it is about the fight , the protesting, and the feelings generated thereby. Nothing is ever going to be enought to slake their thirst for power.
Having been one of them for a long, long time it's more or less of all of the above for various of them (formerly us) at various times in their (our) lives.
The one thing I, at least, would never have admitted even to myself was that it was about power. Because power is hierarchical, and "hierarchy - BAD," of course. And to the extent that it was about being "in power" (by fair and legitimate political and administrative processes), it was all in the name of "having the power" to affect positive change for all the various "oppressed/marginalized/colonized" groups that needed change to be made...
For many true believers now, I think they do think that if they change words they change culture (Mao, yep) and that changes people's minds and behaviors. But mostly I think a lot of folks don't think at all and it just "feels right." Whether it feels right b/c it makes one feel "powerful" (as opposed to empowered, maybe...) or just b/c one wants to feel nice and part of the group, I dunno. One thing I know almost none of them are gonna do is pay a whole bunch more in taxes, give up their nice homes, cars, vacations, doggy day cares, etc., much less their 401Ks...
Thank you for this. I really appreciate the insight. I did not mean to sound harsh. I am just so weary of this. It is like trying to live on a sand dune of ever shifting sand. I don't like change to start with so when I accept it I have to be satisfied there is just cause to do so. But if all of this demand for change is supposed to enlighten or improve me it is having the opposite effect. There is a world of things I simply could care less about now - climate change, saving water, saving electricity, saving the planet, saving the whales, donating to any cause, etc.. I seriously doubt I am the only one.
Why is it so hard to understand that 300 years ago social values and circumstances were different than they are today and that slavery was common all over the world? Why all the hand-wringing and hair-pulling instead of celebration for the fact that it was WE (i.e., Britain and the US) who were the first to outlaw slavery!?
Not just Africa. It exists and creates fortunes in inner cities across the United States today. It may not be chattel slavery per se but it is slavery just the same. We would be better served by working to end that rather than working to erase history.
In fact, the current virtue-signaling administration is complicit and participatory in current smuggling, slavery and indentured servitude as well as child sex trafficking at the southern border. Why don’t these navel gazers pay attention to the present instead of the long past?
How many Chinese Uyghur slaves does it take to mine the Lithium necessary to make one battery for the taxpayer subsidized EVs these virtue signaling assholes drive?
Yes but unless it’s evil whites doing it no one cares. Shouldn’t they just cut to the chase and start show trials and building concentration camps for whites.
I didn't know about Audubon's slaves, but what bothered me was that he killed every bird that he painted. To him, birds were no different from flowers.
This attitude still instructs protected species legislation - pick the wrong plant, kill a tiger or stuff 100 parrots in a box to smuggle them in - it's the same crime. Maybe start there to make meaningful changes.
This is just the way natural history was done until sometime the twentieth century.
Darwin gathered a lot of animal specimens, including birds, when he was ship's naturalist on the Beagle. With few exceptions - including one giant tortoise which survived into the 21st century! - it was just not possible to take or send living specimens back to England for study.
But the activities of naturalists would have had a negligible impact on bird populations, compared to habitat loss and harvesting them for one or another kind of resource. One of the first causes of the original Audubon societies was to end the fashion trend of women wearing elaborate hats decorated with bird feathers or, in some cases, whole dead birds!
(Correction: I tried to verify the claim that a tortoise collected by Darwin survived until 2006. It turns out to be an urban legend, which is a pity. It's precisely the kind of thing I would want to be true! Several young tortoises were kept alive on the Beagle for the voyage home, though.)
Color photography wasn't invented. In order to get a still model he had to shoot them. His paintings spurred an international conservation movement which has saved countless plants and wildlife.
Nelson gives the game away. Starts out saying it’s about slavery. Then somehow “harming ‘marginalized’ communities”. Then “white supremacy embedded in the outdoors “. In other words, embedded in everything everywhere, so tear it all down.
It’s a mass delusion he and millions have bought into. They are cultists. And they are winning.
I can see someone saying "this organization is named after someone who committed acts that we now find appalling, so let's change the name." I disagree with that, but I understand the argument.
Saying “white supremacy is embedded in the outdoors,“ on the other hand, marks you as a hyperbolic mal-educated idiot.
The problem is that those two arguments go hand in hand for Leftists.
Most of the powerful men in history (and many of the powerful women) did things we would now find appalling. Our Founders did things that their own contemporaries would have found appalling if those acts had been made public. One of the essential points of the musical Hamilton is that Hamilton was poised to be a likely candidate for POTUS, but he was no longer a viable candidate when he was forced into a position where he had to confess that he had cheated on his wife with another man's wife. That kind of thing could be done in private, but if it was made public, you were toast.
I'm old enough to remember when Gary Hart--a prospective Democrat POTUS candidate in 1988--had to drop out of the race because he had been seen on a yacht with a woman other than his wife. It was only the Democrats' reaction to Bill Clinton's sexual behavior that made it possible for a man to become POTUS if he did not at least *appear* to be respectable.
So the notion that we can look back in history and find people so free of flaws that no one will ever find any aspect of their behavior appalling at some future point is absurd. Nor do Democrats actually care about bad behavior if the person they want to honor has the right credentials (witness the deification of George Floyd).
The Left's desire to eliminate the names of men who, despite having done tremendous things for our country, were (like many men of their time) slaveholders does not stop with a name like Audubon. These people want to get rid of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
I think most of us assumed that, with the fall of the Soviet Union, Marxism/Communism was no longer a threat. But the Long Marchers were still marching, and they didn't give up on Marxism.
I only vaguely knew anything about the Chinese Cultural Revolution until the past decade. It seemed irrelevant to the West that the Chinese discovered the hard way that authoritarian social engineering based on utopian fantasy instead of science would be disastrous.
But these Leftists seem incapable of (or unwilling to) learn from history. They are True Believers and nothing will shake their Faith.
Taking the logic of this, we get rid of that racist Declaration of Independence and all other documents that are the DNA of this country. This sounds to me like Mao’s New Man and the great leap forward. Is this the objective for the USA? If so, this country is really over. I see a lot of virtue signaling and little change, where change is important. In the communities most affected by racism and classism.
The goal is for all of the underclasses to be the same. The way to accomplish that is not to elevate communities identified as being most affected by racism and classism, rather it is to strip other underclasses identified as oppressors of vestiges of wealth, position, status, etc.. Except it is a fraud because the real oppressors are not white people who toil and pay taxes it is big banks and big finance and their political lapdogs which make up the overcoats. They call themselves "elites". Big banks and big finance which financed and profited from slavery and never issued a mea culpa, much less faced retribution. Big banks and big finance which have grown ever more powerful in the post-Civil War drive toward evermore central government. Today they drive the ESG craziness.
What I don’t get is women going along with this. How about all the women in the country demand back pay for the last few centuries and the renaming of everything named after a sexist man, like Roosevelt , for instance, who had plenty of privilege and cheated on his wife. Roosevelt field will henceforth be named….
This is a brilliant article, and I am amazed by how others think. What strikes me is that we must live by the dictates of an over-sensitive, ideological group of progressives. Only a few people who need help understanding history or human nature care about the name Audubon. But since their little feelings get hurt, the rest of us have to walk on eggshells around them. I was so glad that some chapters kept the name and others withdrew their funding. What some call the culture wars are, in reality, people just defending sanity. I don't need to be told what I am by a bunch of idiot leftists. If they want to start their own group but know this is not a march for progress. This change is actually regressive as it's a descent toward totalitarianism. Thanks again for this provocative and educational read.
“This issue made liberal-minded people strikingly illiberal”
There’s a strange irony in this whole dynamic, the effort to dig up forgotten misdeeds and remind everyone of how they should feel harmed seems more to do more harm than just letting the thing continue to compost and lose its stench.
Cooper said it himself, until someone told him he should be offended and hurt, he wasn’t.
Leftists don’t see history as a valuable source of learning from human experience. They already know exactly how humans societies should be structured, and who should be in charge.
They see history as simply a storehouse of grievances to be mined for use as weapons in their war to force their utopia on everyone.
Names, okay. But where does it stop? If I donate to a non-profit I want the money to go to the mission (in this case, bird conservation). Not towards indulgences by paying off DEI administrators or diverting funds to unrelated "social justice" causes.
Thanks for pointing this out. This is what the author missed. He did a good job sketching out the argument for why people want the name changed. The argument against change he made sound like is only about losing brand recognition or salty older folks who think caring about names is "stupid."
No, actually the more significant argument against the name change campaign is due to the propensity of woke activism to shift any and all missions toward woke causes in the name of "diversity, equity, and inclusion." Many people who care about bird conservation want the mission to remain on birds.
Also, he did touch on this point, but it bears repeating: many people don't believe a cultural revolution is going to end well for most people. They'd rather learn from history than erase it. The Mao mindset is not good for the cause of true justice.
Well said, Leah. If you carry the rationale of the name changers to its logical conclusion, no one who's ever done [name your sin] is fit to be remembered, regardless of what societal contribution they may have made. If we're going to cancel and tear down statues of Jefferson and U.S. Grant, and rename the Audubon Society, are we going to hold other people and individuals to same standard?
For example, should the Democratic Party rename itself because so many of its members embraced segregation for 100 years after the Civil War? That chapter in Seattle -- are they going to push to change the name of their state from Washington? Should George Floyd Elementary School be renamed because he committed aggravated robbery on two occasions, along with twice committing crimes using a gun?
This whole thing seems very selective, as well as very Maoist.
"They believe a rebrand will help conservation because more people of all races will be attracted to the cause"
Yea, and they can hire Dylan Mulvaney as their spokesgirl.
Wait! You just suggested another way in which birding is . . . problematic: they keep labeling birds as male and female entirely on the basis of external markers like plumage, and behavior, and, you know, reproductive physiology.
No one has ever asked whether that male cardinal - brightly colored and singing loudly to mark its territory and attract a mate - perhaps *feels* like a female on the inside.
Yup, since we can't ask birds what their gender identity is I suppose the best we can do is say: 'an cardinal assigned male at hatching'.
We laugh, but there is plenty of observed evidence that birds fill certain evolutionary roles, regardless of their sex. What we call gendered roles (I.e: hens and cocks), is performed regardless of sex if there are no biological males, or biological females to fulfill the role. I see it every day with my chickens, and I’ve seen it for decades with my parrots. And we’ve all heard the stories of the penguin pairs who are the same sex, as well as countless other avian examples. Birds do not conform to the Human social construct of gender if their survival necessitates it, but also they don’t give a fig what we think anyways.
JLQ-- They don't have to announce it to the world and don't need to promote their 'way of life'. They just do it. Humans should follow suit.
Until the egregious example of the National Basketball Association begins to diversify and play little people, I cannot in good conscience abide by DEI in the Audubon Society!
The obvious goal of DEI is to demonize Caucasians, wherever they are, in and out of every institution. It has risen to the top priority in the land. Its end goal is obvious - the end of Western Civilization, and the end goal is now in sight.
But they already have a DEI NBA - it’s called the WNBA, it plays in arenas 1/5 the size of NBA arenas, and they still can’t even sell out playoff games.
“Short people got no reason to live” song by recording artist
~Randy Newman~
Do your roosters lay eggs?
Do your hens fertilize one another?
If thousands were isolated awhile, would NOT be totally shocked if one self-fertilized. Has happened with other critters.
That will be the next idea some crazy person will have.
We may laugh, but who knows?? Ha.
My wife says they should rename it "The Dead Birds Society".
😂🤣👍
Wait! There's this bridge over the East River!
Near T-Town?
And hey my kids grew up watching Sesame Street and loved “Auntie Audubon” Big Bird’s aunt….Thinking about how traumatized they will be if poor “Auntie Audubon” is cancelled keeps me up all night worrying about the harm that will cause
"Where does it stop?!"
It DOESN'T stop, comrade! The revolution is ongoing. The struggle continues. Do not grow weary and do not waste bullets when hammers work just as well.
Purge! Purge! Purge!
NARO: SORRY-I'M (FOR WHATEVER REASON) ONLY ALLOWED TO POST IN REPLY.
Should George Floyd have died? Nope. But he was a criminal who did dope (under the influence at the time of his death) and had committed some pretty outrageous crimes. Should the conduct of the police officers involved have been examined and adjudicated? Yep-and It was. Did BLM, the DNC and the MSM weaponize the incident and exploit it for personal gain, subvert the justice system and reduce the trial to a witch hunt? Yep. Did the BLM and its leadership publicly announce themselves to be trained Marxist's while personally profiting from the Floyd death? Yep. Have Black American's coast to coast questioned the use of BLM donation's? Absolutely. Did BLM rhetoric contribute to and encourage the rioting that cost lives and destroyed billions in property during the Covid lockdowns? Did the DNC encourage the riot's, conflate criminality with revolution and does it continue to encourage and exploit the chaos for its own purposes? Yep. Has the BLM, the DNC and corporate controlled media continued to play the race card and taken every opportunity to use race hatred as a wedge to divide American's? Of course. Did the Democratic Party found the Ku Klux Clan? Yep. Is BLM a racist organization? Has the BLM, the DNC and the feminist driven D.E.I. commissariat so infected, distorted and emotionally charged the American national dialogue with racist and sexist rhetoric that it makes it almost impossible for American's to objectively discuss any topic of serious financial, social or cultural concern? Is that the point? Yep.
I own binoculars, provide a constant water source and put out almost a ton of bird seed each year. Living on the edge of a National Forest I can see that birds, all living creatures (we also have puma, bear and elk) are under stress and threat. (Ask Black kid's in D.N.C. controlled Chiraq.) Streams that once ran year round now only flow in spring. Enter the forest and you can feel the hunger. I'm not a member of the Audubon Society.
We had Audubon print's on our walls when I was a child. The man was a major talent and a conservationist far ahead of his time. The spontaneity of Audubon Society membership in keeping the organization alive is commendable. The conscious display of concern and open proclamation of our connection to nature and our responsibility for its preservation cannot be questioned. Why and who would risk destruction of such a worthwhile endeavor?
The journalist was correct in reporting on the situation. It matters. But, as in every other heart rending report of this type it is merely, like snakebite, a report on the slow spread of poison in the lymph. The senseless cancellation of worthy lives. The de-platforming of yet another truthful voice. Journalist's berated and abused at the congressional hearing. The lockdown. The perpetual lie and the cover-up. All.
The more important point is theat Floyd died while in custody for alleged criminal activity, and resisting arrest. He died because he was resisting arrest. He did NOT die because his life was so important it was worth saving.
Brilliant post on all counts, political and ecological. The natural world is dying as we watch.
Right on the money. Great post!
Are you a paid subscriber? If not, that may be the reason you can only post in a reply
Two words for the name changing crowd - Elihu Yale. No one would have ever heard of Robert E. Lee if it wasn't for Elihu Yale.
Huh?
I'm not finding any connection between Yale and Lee
Wishful thinking. Their most recent published Form 990 shows they have $590 million in net assets, having made $48million and $31 million in the prior two fiscal years. The CEO made almost $900k in the most recent year.
Like many non-profits who prey on stupid people, they are a scam.
Holy hell, you are right: $898,880, to be exact.
Though if the people interviewed in this article are the sort that the CEO has to deal with, he might have been underpaid.
Oh I see, Naro. So you’re pro slavery then?
only if it happens elsewhere and I can have my Prius complete with battery
Presentism is vile. Acknowledging the man's past is one thing. Changing the society's name is foolish.
The correct response to these hustlers, from Audubon, is to flip them the bird and start selling Quack Lives Matter t-shirts on their website.
But I’m sure they will cave and issue a statement about how winged-flight is racist.
Where does this PC/Woke crap end? Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and almost every civilization on Earth had slaves. Does this mean we should empty the museums of the world of pre 20th century artifacts? Turn all of the ancient statuary into gravel and destroy all artwork from these slave owning societies?
Do these tyrannical assholes want to rewrite history, burn all books that mention slaves, Shakespeare, Huckleberry Finn, Gone With The Wind, The Bible and hundreds of thousand of ancient texts and all literature that not only write about slavery but those works that came from slave owning societies?
Again I ask, where does it end?
If I weren't so old I'd move to Ticino Switzerland and sit on my patio admiring the glory of the Alps and drink good wine out of a paper sack.
The Taliban is their role model - blowing up ancient Buddhist statues.
Good comparison.
The most ironic moment was when a few days ago the NYT published an article about black people who were enslaved by Oklahoma Native Americans (of course, the article was about the rights of those people somehow being trampled by police trying to enforce laws). I was like: wait a minute, so a major VICTIM group has victimized another major VICTIM group? That blows my intersectional fuses, it’s too difficult to fathom! So everybody does it, just like the West African black kingdoms of W Africa, who were begging the British as late as the 1870s to resume the “mutually beneficial” slave trade? Isn’t that supposed to happen only because “racism is in white people’s DNA”?
You are correct. Black slavers raided African villages to capture black people and sell them to slavers
The Kingdom of Dahomey (part of modern Benin) was dependent on the sale of slaves to foreigners.
Did the slaving murderers dress like those depicted in that Marvel "Wakanda" superhero flick?
It ends with the total and complete appropriation of those cultures and their proponents marginalized and oppressed. This is vengeance pure and simple.
It doesn't end, because these people always need something to fight against, and to fuel their livelihood if they've become professionally aggrieved.
Specieist.
Specious.
Something like that.
Flight Supremacy?
😂😂😂vs white supremacy!
I almost gave up on this article upon the assertion: "Simply to say he was a man of his time and bore no responsibility on slavery is historically and intellectually a mistake."
Audubon DIED before the Civil War. He grew up in a time and place when slaveholding was considered completely acceptable (as it had been for thousands of years of human history prior to that point). Expecting the man to reject what was normal in his world is not merely unreasonable, it is outrageously unreasonable.
The ironic thing is that Leftists constantly scream for lower standards for POCs because the "systemically racist" world in which they live means they can't be expected to do any better. Progressives want POC to be able to steal, assault, and murder without consequences, because it's "not fair" to punish them for behavior that is supposedly "caused" by racism.
And yet white people of the past were supposedly unaffected by the social environment they grew up in. They should have KNOWN--say Leftists--that slavery was evil, and they should have gotten rid of it AND "systemic racism" in their own era. And the failure to have done so makes them automatically too evil to have their names spoken ever again.
This is one of the most interesting fallacies I have seen mentioned! The idea that we have to give current people a pass because society is holding them back. But people of the past can't have that same pass for being held back by their society. Excellent.
Leftists are experts at Rules for Thee but Not for Me.
Six hundred thousand Union casualties in the Civil War suggests that some of them knew.
Six hundred thousand NORTHERNERS, who did not grow up surrounded by slave-owners, but rather by Abolitionists. And although you might find it uncomfortable, chances are that most of them who didn't want black people to be slaves anymore nevertheless did not want black people to be their neighbors.
If Northerners were so wonderful, the former slaves who migrated north would not have faced persistent racism in their new cities.
Of course the Union soldiers were volunteers. This was why there were no draft rioits in New York and no Irish folk songs about coming to America to be free and being impressed (Enslaved) off the boat and crippled in a war that had fuck all to do with them. Shining city on a hill or a country and people, whatever their political bent, that has been shit since the first Thanksgiving?
Absolutely!
But the name's been keeping all those BIPOC birders out!
Erase the man. Erase all good that he did for conservancy.
History scares the hell out of some people, hence the presentism. Hence the whitewash. Hence the erasing.
All four Presidents on Mt. Rushmore believed whites were superior to blacks. I'm surprised progressives haven't mined it with sticks of dynamite yet..
It’s coming very soon!
No doubt..
I think it will come down eventually if the current societal direction continues. It will be sad.
But "presentism?" The Dogs of Neolog have been well and truly loosed...
Presentism - -seeks to judge the past by today's standards. Basically it is following this Orwellian mantra: Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.
Contextualization seeks to explain the past was a different country and put the problematic into context.
"History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right."
Slightly different now tho. We could say that we have an endless present of perpetual Victimhood, but that rests on a never receding past of slavery. The chains rattle today as loudly as they did in 1863 and they will never stop rattling.
Not as long as there is attention gained, advantages had, and money made from doing so.
Exactly J.
All the seemingly-unrelated "movements" are in reality pieces of the giant puzzle called, variously, Communist Revolution, One World Government, Elite Totalitarianism.
It's quite revealing to read the Enemy's literature; destruction of the nuclear family, destruction of tradition, destroying and rewriting history are all parts, and so is "presentism" - the idea that all history, traditional thought, and principles are relics of the past; that those people were stupid and unenlightened (not like us, who are f'ing geniuses), and we have to eliminate from our lives all their knuckle-dragging ideas.
My personal favorite is "speciesism".
'Speciesism' is old hat in the literature of environmental ethics. It's an unnecessarily contentious and somewhat cringe-inducing term that stems from a really interesting question about who or what should be given moral consideration.
Put simply, following terms suggested by Aldo Leopold, our treatment of some things is a matter of ethics, while our treatment of other things is a matter of expediency. Is there any non-arbitrary reason why only human beings should be given moral consideration?
This is a worthwhile question, one that merits some careful thought and requires a lot of nuance.
The charge of 'speciesism' is an impatient short-cut, replacing careful thought with mere name-calling and guilt by association. The implication is supposed to be that 'speciesism' is no more justifiable than racism or sexism.
Aw, gee. Judging the past by the standards of the present. That's not *such* a freakily jargony term.
No, but it is THE mark of an amateur historian.
Do actual historians still exist? If so, where?
Historians will want to look back & change the names of institutions named for people who owned Priuses. Those ridiculous un-battery-recyclable status symbols built on the backs of cobalt-mining children that made the leash China has us on for rare minerals like lithium even shorter. Well done. I'll take my 86 Honda Civic, of which I am the original owner, which has gotten and STILL gets 40 mpg, any day of the week.
And the forests in Indonesia being plowed up to mine nickel.
Mine's a Toyota Corolla, 2007, plus it's got my old Brewer's sticker on it. Priceless. I will keep it until it hits 300,000 miles or I die first.
My little girl just turned 375,000 miles the other day. I always video moments like that. I went bananas when she turned 333,333.3, lol. Anyway we are going for half a million, at which time I am going to call Honda & see what kind of accolades they want to bestow.
They will put you and her in the Honda museum!
How cool will that be. I heard a story about a guy who drove a volkswagen 500K miles & they gave him a free one, but it could be an urban myth. Worth a try, but I'd still drive my girl.
Heard the same thing about Toyota. I think it was real.
Don’t hold your breath and with CC we will be lucky if the deep state allow us to drive at all!
See if you can get an emblem.
My 2012 Corolla has 144,000 miles, nothing goes wrong with it. My son said I should get a good car...I told him I have a good car!
Toyotas (and their "luxury" up-brand Lexus) are awesome. We have a 2008 FJ and 2009 RX350, both over 150K miles, and both run beautifully with the appropriate amount of maintenance :)
YAY. Exactly.
Happy driving
I plan to be buried in Inga or Birgitta. Both 1993 Volvo 240 Classics. Both over 200,000 miles.
No precious metals required for my Swedish women.
I said that about my girl for a long time. I have now decided to will her to my mechanic, who loves her dearly.
Hope he treats her well
Excellent.
A human after my own heart.
Audubon owned slaves. I. Don't. Care. If the Audubon Society changes its name, I will respond precisely the same way I did when the Confederate Air Force changed its name to the Commemorative Air Force or when Anheuser-Busch lost its mind: I will withdraw all monetary support. My few dollars don't mean much to these organizations, but it makes ME happy, and that's all that matters.
Same here. "Think global; act local"
ly and ly
I'd ask you to reconsider. While I completely understand your sentiment, please consider the HUGE difference between organizations that protect wildlife versus corporations that make bad beer. If you pull your support for Audubon, it's the innocent birds and natural ecosystem that will suffer.
So be it. Sacrifices must be made.
I’m sorry but including Christian Cooper in this story is indicative of the nature (pun intended) of this piece. This guy threatened a woman with attempting to steal her dogs and when she gave a physical description to the police, cried racism to hide behind his bad behavior. Virtue signaling with name changes is still just virtue signaling. Instead of worrying about the name and the history, maybe worry more about the birds, and perhaps about the human feces they have to ignore as they step over it. Rome is burning while Nero fiddles....
And let's not forget the most recent "Karen," Sarah Comrie who was vilified because she confronted a bunch of young black boys who tried to take the Citibike she legally rented. Another fake racial incident in which, had the boys been white, and acted like idiots, would never have been reported. In NYC - or other strongholds of leftist insanity - one fights back against a black assailant at one's peril. Just ask Daniel Penny.
Worse, the card-carrying jerk was rewarded for it with a TV Series. We all know that if the NYPD had shown up in response to "Karen's" call, they would have shrugged the whole thing off. But noooooooo, the Drama Queens of BLM / MOB JUSTICE have the useful idiots convinced that the (probably black and Hispanic) cops would have arrived guns blazing and shot him dead.
Which is ironic because I'd like to see Christian Cooper go where he put Amy Cooper.
Yeah, interviewing Cooper *seriously* was a huge indication of the non-serious nature of this article. His inappropriate behavior toward ALL dogwalkers was called out by a black dogwalker. Threats to poison people's dogs are not acceptable. The fact that anyone could take this man seriously is disturbing.
Exactly. For those who haven't been with Common Sense/FP since the beginning, here is the site's piece on CP Karen. It was illuminating: https://www.thefp.com/p/the-real-story-of-the-central-park
Rome is burning while Nero fiddles... with kids.
Being a progressive means sacrificing 10,000 years of human history to 50 years of utopian thinking. “Colonialism” is simply the way people lived - until a bunch of privileged brats decided their cushy, guilt ridden, elite ideas more more important then every one else’s. So disheartening...
Those privileged brats live quite nicely on the trust funds created via the “sins” of their ancestors.
I wonder how many of these individuals have read 1984? I’m also reminded of something Scott Peck wrote about how great evil is sometimes committed by people absolutely convinced of the righteousness of their actions. Not saying that renaming organizations is great evil, but i think that many of these self righteous individuals are completely convinced of their own virtue in doing so.
ALL evil is comitted by folk who think they are righteous, Stalin, Mao, Hitler. Hitler even thought of himself as an righteous upstanding Christian FFS.
Yes. Reading Peck’s work has motivated me to always question myself about my reactions. Self-examination is one of our best antidotes to facilitating evil ourselves.
Ain’t that the truth
You have hit the nail on the head except I wouldn't call it utopia. I call it fascist tyranny. For thousands of years slavery was practiced and considered moral. You cannot judge the morals of the past by the morals of today.
The tyrants on the left willfully ignore that most countries that practice the religion of peace condone slavery and have slaves. The black Muslim country of Sudan raided Christian villages, in the 20th cen. slaughtering everybody in the village except women and small children who they took as slaves.
The left worships the religion of peace and pillories anyone who criticizes it. Where is their outrage over a modern day Muslim country condoning slavery. It is easier for these whacky left wing nutz to tear down statues and organizations over something that happened in this country over 100 years ago than to condemn their Muslim heroes.
If for some reason I had a national audience and stood up and cursed Islam for having slaves, beating and killing women and throwing homosexuals off roof tops the left would curse me for being Islamophobic and ignore the facts I was presenting.
When the left can't win an argument, they change the subject and call you names, like racist or xenophobe and tear down statues or change an organization's name.
This piece made me chuckle out loud a few times. I have worked in nonprofits for 11 years and I've been following the leftist, DIE madness in the industry that is rampant and taking over missions and causing such a ruckus. It's everywhere, grab your popcorn and get Googling if you want a show - nonprofits are EATING each other from the inside out over this stuff instead of focusing on what they were really meant to do: their missions!
The Audubon name change is just one of many I am aware of that are having conversations about how their history or a name or some other innocuous piece of their organization that they dug up for some perverted attempt at prostration in the wake of George Floyd because it is perceived as "harming" marginalized communities. It doesn't cause any harm, that's absolutely ridiculous. Most people don't even know who Audubon was let alone that he owned slaves. The name had changed already because it had become synonymous with conservation. The name was redeemed through the acts of the organization in preserving nature, habitats, and bringing joy to retirees looking for bushtits all over the U.S. in a way a dead man for whom it is named cannot. Must everything be reduced to this single, small-minded contention that has to do with the fact that early America involved slavery? Someone find me a civilization that did not participate in such immoral and horrible acts...go on, I'll wait...
Everything is damned and dirty in such a narrow, reductionist narrative and frankly, it's exhausting and it distracts from REAL issues and REAL harms that are happening to marginalized communities that any nonprofit worth its salt would actually be working on. By all means, focus on changing the Audubon society's name because the namesake had slaves about 150 years ago instead of trying to stop the rise of Black on Black crime, the ever increasing high school drop out, the decreasing literary rates in fourth graders, and the epidemic of opioid deaths that are happening NOW. Great idea - you might as well go fly a kite it'll be just as effective as changing an organization's name in the fight against harms to marginalized people.
Or maybe, just maybe, stick to your mission and keep trying to increase the habitat for the bushtit. Redemption through deeds not words.
Or maybe no redemption is necessary for a bird conservation society being named after the first guy to devote his life to cataloguing and publishing all the species of birds in North America.
And there is that!
What's a "marginalized community?"
Who's "marginalizing" them? Other than their own members?
Can we please stop using the rhetoric of these arsonists?
Good question!
I think there are at least two ways of thinking about this phrase though, I’m sure there are more. These will be overly simplified.
One way, as perceived by the left, as people who are usually non-White who have been disenfranchised simply based on their ethnicity or race because of racism, or sexuality because of sexism,etc. They lack access to privileges and opportunities in life because of barriers to success, they are the victims of White supremacy or capitalism or homophobia, etc. I don’t agree with this, but that’s one way I’ve heard it explained. It’s also a Marxist approach, but who has time to get into that fun conversation?!
The other is to interpret it as anyone living on the margins of society and not benefiting from what it has provided those who are living relatively well.
Usually these communities are described outside of class terms which, I think, misses the point, and usually their unfortunate and unfair status in society is blamed on everyone else who is not living like they are.
I have read that all.of this has been framed recently in terms of racism because to do so on the basis of class does not work well here. People do not want the same things. Some people are never satisfied materially. Some people are satisfied with less materially. Some people disavow material possessions altogether. It is these post-modernists who define people by what they have as opposed to who they are. All while preaching about diversity and tolerance. I call BS.
Doesn't work well here either; the English "working class" is, always was, and always will be, deeply c/Conservative and has always acknowledged its "betters" who for the most part always acknowledeged them and kept their part of the bargain.
The franchise was widened by who? The Aristocrats with the power, then the Aristocrats and Bourgeoisie with the power, then the men with the power, then the "straight" people with the power. If the vast majority of the folk with the power hadn't wanted to extend the franchise and had wanted only to oppress, King John would be lauded as a great English Hero and not despised as a complete cunt.
Marx & Engels didn't have a clue even when they were writing.
Marx & Engels were two flea-bitten German losers who managed to create more misery, death and despair than any other political puppetmasters in history.
Good point.
L. Edge - you really nailed it with the "harming" words. I've never understood how something like this is causing harm. I don't think young black men in Chicago or any other city are feeling hurt because of the Audubon society name! Maybe they're hurt because there's no real school that's worth a darn, no options, no opportunities and now...no police! You're post really struck a chord with me. Thanks for writing it.
Over the last couple of days I've been hearing about the name change for Fort Bragg. I'm wondering if even one person had driven by Fort Bragg and thought "Bragg was a racist confederate. This has ruined my day. I bet not.
I think by now we should rename everything George Floyd since it is the only name that appease the woke crowd
Great post! You captured it all.
The problem with most of these people who support cancellations of the past, or presentism, is they rarely ever improve the present. On the contrary, in all likelihood they’re setting us up for a terrible future.
Excellent point. How are birds better protected when the well-known name is replaced with something no one cares about? It makes no sense. People will stop donating and nothing gets better. But some people will feel personally righteous.
Precisely, well said.
I wonder what all these loons would says about the blacks who owned black slaves in the south.
I should have added that native Americans also owned black slaves.
One is not allowed to talk about that. They were merely internalizing the white oppression that had been forced upon them... ...does make the whole reparations thing a bit messy, though...
Except that they had been enslaving people of other tribes since long before Europeans came to this continent. I guess "white oppression" is able to defy physics and travel throughout time and space.
Not just owned slaves but were hired as slave catchers to track them down for the owners. But who cares about that when you go on feelings not facts.
Maureen, come now. They were just victims of internalized racism. Not culpable. ; )
Yeah, all five of the "civilized tribes" should have to change their names, too.
There were even blacks who owned slaves.
"Loons" - that's good. A missed opportunity on the title. It should have been "Looney Tunes".
I don't believe that they really care about any of that - black-owned slaves, white-owned slaves, black slave traders or indentured servants, like my ancestors. They just want lucre and dominance. And fame. Social Justice Warrioring seems to them like the easiest grift to get those things.
They remind me of a fellow I grew up with. Always a bully, he finally caught religion and started bullyragging all his neighbors to get "saved." In reality he was a nobody. But he desperately wanted to be Somebody. They - and he - will never get what they want.
Before any name is changed, any statue demolished, any words in a book changed, I submit that everyone voting for such changes, should be required to submit their taxes to see how much they donated to support all these minorities they are protecting.
I have often wondered why changing names, etc due to some dark history these folks uncovered in their deep research into American slave-holding history, , is going to help anyone except their own virtue signaling reputations. Noone, that I have read about, has sold their large homes - I am from Portland so know all too well about those homes - to finance low income housing : none that I know of have taken in two or three black or Native America teenagers and supported them for years in private schools so they can overcome their racist history and succeed in today's world.
When it was recently discovered that the ancestors of Angela Davis came over on the Mayflower as COLONISTS for heaven's sake, I had to laugh. Wonder if Henry Gates did a heritage history of any of these folks, he would find a slave owner. Oh THE HORROR. .
Yeah, it's so much easier to "do something" by changing names and forcing pronouns, etc.
Personally I do not think they really care about that either. I truly believe it is about the fight , the protesting, and the feelings generated thereby. Nothing is ever going to be enought to slake their thirst for power.
Having been one of them for a long, long time it's more or less of all of the above for various of them (formerly us) at various times in their (our) lives.
The one thing I, at least, would never have admitted even to myself was that it was about power. Because power is hierarchical, and "hierarchy - BAD," of course. And to the extent that it was about being "in power" (by fair and legitimate political and administrative processes), it was all in the name of "having the power" to affect positive change for all the various "oppressed/marginalized/colonized" groups that needed change to be made...
For many true believers now, I think they do think that if they change words they change culture (Mao, yep) and that changes people's minds and behaviors. But mostly I think a lot of folks don't think at all and it just "feels right." Whether it feels right b/c it makes one feel "powerful" (as opposed to empowered, maybe...) or just b/c one wants to feel nice and part of the group, I dunno. One thing I know almost none of them are gonna do is pay a whole bunch more in taxes, give up their nice homes, cars, vacations, doggy day cares, etc., much less their 401Ks...
Thank you for this. I really appreciate the insight. I did not mean to sound harsh. I am just so weary of this. It is like trying to live on a sand dune of ever shifting sand. I don't like change to start with so when I accept it I have to be satisfied there is just cause to do so. But if all of this demand for change is supposed to enlighten or improve me it is having the opposite effect. There is a world of things I simply could care less about now - climate change, saving water, saving electricity, saving the planet, saving the whales, donating to any cause, etc.. I seriously doubt I am the only one.
The left ignores facts and history they don't like. They live a wacky leftwing fantasy full of unicorns, rainbows and butterflies.
they weren't slaves. they were "friends" who helped out and worked for free. unless they tried to move elsewhere
Why is it so hard to understand that 300 years ago social values and circumstances were different than they are today and that slavery was common all over the world? Why all the hand-wringing and hair-pulling instead of celebration for the fact that it was WE (i.e., Britain and the US) who were the first to outlaw slavery!?
Slavery still exists in Africa today.
Not just Africa. It exists and creates fortunes in inner cities across the United States today. It may not be chattel slavery per se but it is slavery just the same. We would be better served by working to end that rather than working to erase history.
In fact, the current virtue-signaling administration is complicit and participatory in current smuggling, slavery and indentured servitude as well as child sex trafficking at the southern border. Why don’t these navel gazers pay attention to the present instead of the long past?
How many Chinese Uyghur slaves does it take to mine the Lithium necessary to make one battery for the taxpayer subsidized EVs these virtue signaling assholes drive?
The Chinese Communist Party runs both slave labor and concentration camps.
Yes but unless it’s evil whites doing it no one cares. Shouldn’t they just cut to the chase and start show trials and building concentration camps for whites.
Concentrations camps were so FDR.
It’s coming soon!
And in almost every Muslim (religion of peace) country.
Yip it does
Because it makes those loony lefties feel so much better about themselves. Just imagine how sadly lacking those people must be....
Should've left it buried. Who he was is unimportant. What the organization has done since it was founded is what the name means.
Exactly
I didn't know about Audubon's slaves, but what bothered me was that he killed every bird that he painted. To him, birds were no different from flowers.
This attitude still instructs protected species legislation - pick the wrong plant, kill a tiger or stuff 100 parrots in a box to smuggle them in - it's the same crime. Maybe start there to make meaningful changes.
This is just the way natural history was done until sometime the twentieth century.
Darwin gathered a lot of animal specimens, including birds, when he was ship's naturalist on the Beagle. With few exceptions - including one giant tortoise which survived into the 21st century! - it was just not possible to take or send living specimens back to England for study.
But the activities of naturalists would have had a negligible impact on bird populations, compared to habitat loss and harvesting them for one or another kind of resource. One of the first causes of the original Audubon societies was to end the fashion trend of women wearing elaborate hats decorated with bird feathers or, in some cases, whole dead birds!
(Correction: I tried to verify the claim that a tortoise collected by Darwin survived until 2006. It turns out to be an urban legend, which is a pity. It's precisely the kind of thing I would want to be true! Several young tortoises were kept alive on the Beagle for the voyage home, though.)
"Several young tortoises were kept alive on the Beagle for the voyage home, though." - Probably as food.
No, they were kept for observation and/or as pets.
Your avatar is a Cattleya orchid.
Color photography wasn't invented. In order to get a still model he had to shoot them. His paintings spurred an international conservation movement which has saved countless plants and wildlife.
His paintings are stunning.
How was he to accurately paint a living bird?
Binoculars were already invented.
Birds are stationary? Photographs existed?
Not so much - either.
Nelson gives the game away. Starts out saying it’s about slavery. Then somehow “harming ‘marginalized’ communities”. Then “white supremacy embedded in the outdoors “. In other words, embedded in everything everywhere, so tear it all down.
It’s a mass delusion he and millions have bought into. They are cultists. And they are winning.
Totalitarians gonna totalitarian.
I can see someone saying "this organization is named after someone who committed acts that we now find appalling, so let's change the name." I disagree with that, but I understand the argument.
Saying “white supremacy is embedded in the outdoors,“ on the other hand, marks you as a hyperbolic mal-educated idiot.
The problem is that those two arguments go hand in hand for Leftists.
Most of the powerful men in history (and many of the powerful women) did things we would now find appalling. Our Founders did things that their own contemporaries would have found appalling if those acts had been made public. One of the essential points of the musical Hamilton is that Hamilton was poised to be a likely candidate for POTUS, but he was no longer a viable candidate when he was forced into a position where he had to confess that he had cheated on his wife with another man's wife. That kind of thing could be done in private, but if it was made public, you were toast.
I'm old enough to remember when Gary Hart--a prospective Democrat POTUS candidate in 1988--had to drop out of the race because he had been seen on a yacht with a woman other than his wife. It was only the Democrats' reaction to Bill Clinton's sexual behavior that made it possible for a man to become POTUS if he did not at least *appear* to be respectable.
So the notion that we can look back in history and find people so free of flaws that no one will ever find any aspect of their behavior appalling at some future point is absurd. Nor do Democrats actually care about bad behavior if the person they want to honor has the right credentials (witness the deification of George Floyd).
The Left's desire to eliminate the names of men who, despite having done tremendous things for our country, were (like many men of their time) slaveholders does not stop with a name like Audubon. These people want to get rid of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
Agreed. There's a lot less "let's rebrand to be more neutral" and a lot more "destroy the Four Olds" in all of this.
(BTW, did we ever think we'd be needing to learn so much about the Chinese Cultural Revolution?)
I think most of us assumed that, with the fall of the Soviet Union, Marxism/Communism was no longer a threat. But the Long Marchers were still marching, and they didn't give up on Marxism.
I only vaguely knew anything about the Chinese Cultural Revolution until the past decade. It seemed irrelevant to the West that the Chinese discovered the hard way that authoritarian social engineering based on utopian fantasy instead of science would be disastrous.
But these Leftists seem incapable of (or unwilling to) learn from history. They are True Believers and nothing will shake their Faith.
Leftist buzzword bingo. They can't help themselves.
Taking the logic of this, we get rid of that racist Declaration of Independence and all other documents that are the DNA of this country. This sounds to me like Mao’s New Man and the great leap forward. Is this the objective for the USA? If so, this country is really over. I see a lot of virtue signaling and little change, where change is important. In the communities most affected by racism and classism.
Yes. It is definitely the objective. These people are all Marxist communist revolutionaries. Period.
More like the Taliban who blew up the statues. Nihilistic freaks.
Same goes for Marxists actually.
We are living through the transition from Republic to Empire. The hidden concentration of power is now being openly exercised. Constitution be damned!
The goal is for all of the underclasses to be the same. The way to accomplish that is not to elevate communities identified as being most affected by racism and classism, rather it is to strip other underclasses identified as oppressors of vestiges of wealth, position, status, etc.. Except it is a fraud because the real oppressors are not white people who toil and pay taxes it is big banks and big finance and their political lapdogs which make up the overcoats. They call themselves "elites". Big banks and big finance which financed and profited from slavery and never issued a mea culpa, much less faced retribution. Big banks and big finance which have grown ever more powerful in the post-Civil War drive toward evermore central government. Today they drive the ESG craziness.
Brilliant post Lynne
What I don’t get is women going along with this. How about all the women in the country demand back pay for the last few centuries and the renaming of everything named after a sexist man, like Roosevelt , for instance, who had plenty of privilege and cheated on his wife. Roosevelt field will henceforth be named….
This is a brilliant article, and I am amazed by how others think. What strikes me is that we must live by the dictates of an over-sensitive, ideological group of progressives. Only a few people who need help understanding history or human nature care about the name Audubon. But since their little feelings get hurt, the rest of us have to walk on eggshells around them. I was so glad that some chapters kept the name and others withdrew their funding. What some call the culture wars are, in reality, people just defending sanity. I don't need to be told what I am by a bunch of idiot leftists. If they want to start their own group but know this is not a march for progress. This change is actually regressive as it's a descent toward totalitarianism. Thanks again for this provocative and educational read.
Liberals aren't liberal and progressives aren't progressive.
“This issue made liberal-minded people strikingly illiberal”
There’s a strange irony in this whole dynamic, the effort to dig up forgotten misdeeds and remind everyone of how they should feel harmed seems more to do more harm than just letting the thing continue to compost and lose its stench.
Cooper said it himself, until someone told him he should be offended and hurt, he wasn’t.
Leftists don’t see history as a valuable source of learning from human experience. They already know exactly how humans societies should be structured, and who should be in charge.
They see history as simply a storehouse of grievances to be mined for use as weapons in their war to force their utopia on everyone.
And when all is said and done, Audubon was the one who started this. He was white and a man. Get over it and go look for birds.