Tag Archives: Redskins

The R-word

Geronimo defended Apache lands against Mexicans and Texan forces (by Edward S. Curtis)

Geronimo defended Apache lands against Mexicans and Texan forces (by Edward S. Curtis)

One of the first books I read was James Fennimore Cooper’s, “The Last of the Mohicans.”  Cooper also wrote, a book titled, “Redskins,” a term much discussed, and rightly so, these days.

In March 2013, Cooper’s hometown, settled by his father, retired the High School’s team name, the “Redskins.”

When I watched tv  as a boy, or went to the local movie house, it was cowboys killing savage “redskins.”

Cooper wrote in his book, “Mohicans,” that, “History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.”

Consider General Jeffrey Amherst, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces.  In 1763, Amherst sought to exterminate Indians by injecting blankets given to American Indians with small pox.

Most Americans look at the large sculpted heads on Mount Rushmore of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, and they see the founding fathers – they see heroes.

The surviving descendants of indigenous tribes observe a somewhat dimmer image of flawed men who sought to destroy their race.

In 1799, General Washington gave orders to “lay waste to all the [Iroquois] settlements around … that the country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed.”

In 1807, President Jefferson said, “…if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe [,] we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated or is driven beyond the Mississippi.”

President Lincoln in December 1862 ordered 38 members of the Dakota Sioux Nation hung for fighting for the food our government promised for their land – but then failed to provide.

President Roosevelt, a self-described Indian fighter, said, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” Continue reading

Board gets a failing grade on schools

One Student’s Plea for saving Lincoln Elementary School!

One Student’s Plea for saving Lincoln Elementary School!

Our Loudoun County Board of Supervisors is poised to close four community schools to save what they spent on the Redskins – two million dollars.

The Board calls this “budgeting.”

I call it government mismanagement, preferring games over grades, and fail the Board for its gross mishandling of a core governmental function, how we rightly educate our children.

In 2012, our football sycophantic Board of Supervisors promised to pay Danny “Redskin” Snyder two million dollars to sell Loudoun as the home of the Redskins; in the bargain, the County got game tix, and a classy suite like political big shots crave to watch pro ball games.

(Not to be too much of a buzz kill, but don’t the Redskins now rehearse their winning team form in Richmond, and not Ashburn?)

Now we want to close these four elementary community schools in Aldie, Hamilton, Hillsboro and Lincoln, the oldest of these founded in 1840 and the newest in 1922, because these closures will save the County two million dollars of a school budget shortfall of thirty eight million dollars, because the proposed budget was irresponsibly shrunken by the Board, making these misguided cuts by our School Board “necessary.”

Outgoing School Superintendent Hatrick, to his credit, fired away, rightly charging in the most forceful language that this Board has created an “artificial crisis,” as 2,000 more students enter our countywide school system, and “willfully chosen not to listen to the public, not to listen to the School Board about the funding that is needed for next year for this school system.” Continue reading

No Representation

In Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning book The Color Purple, Celie refers to her abusive husband as Mr.______. He doesn’t have a name because he beats, abuses and neglects her. He treats her like a piece of chattel property. To him, she isn’t a human being. She’s subhuman. The Mr.______ name is one way of fighting back.

My legislators are like Celie’s husband. Politically, they beat, abuse, and neglect me and thousands of other citizens. I’ll be parsing the words beat, abuse and neglect in future posts to show these behaviors in the public square. This post is an introduction.

Continue reading