I don’t really have a comment, I just thought this sentiment deserved to be repeated.
Just to be clear: fine, let’s say that you do what you can to discourage ‘em; and if they stroke their chins, and then pause while giving a long and meaningful look off into the distance, and then reply, thing is, we’re still voting to rename Washington Junior High, then — what, exactly?
And, all those Confederate generals were very much appreciated where they were at that time.
Then I suppose I’ve lost the argument. Not really much more I can do.
I think that’s what happened here – they had a whole board and everything.
I’ll be honest, though – if they want to rename Washington Junior High to Junior High McJunior Highface, I’m against that. That name is just silly.
I think there may be a misunderstanding here. What makes Lincoln remarkable is that he was ahead of his time. Jefferson Davis and his like were, to put it mildly, very much not. By refusing to acknowledge this difference, we blur the line between them. I believe it’s both more historically accurate and in society’s interests to keep that line nice and bright.
If I may ask, what do you think is gained by removing Lincoln’s name from schools dedicated to him?
Not much. I guess it will make the local people happier, if they rename it after something they like better.
Nothing much is lost, though by changing the name.
Where I live now, elementary schools are named after their local neighborhood and the middle and high schools are named after the town. Should I push to get those renamed after Lincoln? What have we lost by not having our school named after Lincoln?
The thing is, I doubt this “not really my place to tell SF what to name their schools” stance is really any kind of consistent position. If some other town decided to re-name something named after Martin Luther King (on the grounds that he was a tool of International Communism or some damnfool thing like that), I trust most of us wouldn’t just say “Well, it’s not our place to tell them what to do”. There probably wouldn’t be a federal case in the sense that Congress or the Supreme Court could actually override a decision like that and force that town to change the name back, but the rest of the country certainly could and should express its (recreational) moral outrage.
So, I disagree with the idea floating around (and lately expressed by the San Francisco school district) that Washington and Lincoln and Grant somehow belong in the same category of people as Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee or even Andrew Jackson–of people who are so “problematic” that we ought not to honor them by doing things like naming schools after them. I think that’s a foolish and historically ignorant position to take. And I have no trouble expressing my opinion on the matter, even though I don’t live in San Francisco and never have.
I agree with the part I bolded. Where you and I differ is how best to encourage people to think about their history. When you name a building or decide not to change its name today, you are making a comment about standards today, not the standards as they existed years ago.
How do you know the distinctions between Buchanan, Johnson, and Lincoln? I’m guessing it’s because you learned about them in history class, not by tallying up the number of buildings named after each. In history class, you can provide context for how the good they did outweighed their negative actions, or how their actions were influenced by the time they lived in. You can’t provide any of that context in a building name.
Depending on the margin of the vote, in a democracy, even a restrained democracy like ours anything can be passed into law by amending the constitution or rewriting it. So, it helps if there are underlying principles that govern democracy. A set of morality if you will.
One aspect of that set is that I think rewarding mob and irrational behavior sets a bad precedent. You think it’s only this particular set of schools. If we were to look at acts, not in isolation, but defining a curve of some sort over time you could see trends. These trends are derided as a slippery slope fallacy by biased people. But historically speaking we see trends are real. This current trend is disturbing because there is no real limit to how crazy those who push for this sort of thing actually are. We even see some of this in the microcosm of this board in forums such as ATMB.
Yeah, they might point out that hero worship of any kind is kind of a bad idea and we shouldn’t name ANY buildings after ANY people! And what would we do then?!?!?!?!?!1111eleven!!!?!
You know, conservatively speaking there are a metric fuck-ton of buildings named after people. And it’s not just us crazy jingoistic flag-waving Americans, either–people all over the planet have named buildings after other human beings!
Not to mention streets, parks, ships and airplanes and spacecraft, cities and towns, states and provinces, and entire countries. Continents, even. Agglomerations of trillions of stars and planets, which for all we know include countless strange new worlds, full of new life and new civilizations.
We humans are a pretty egotistical bunch, but I doubt that’s going to change anytime soon.
I’m not @Babale, but I think they were just following @octopus’s slippery slope argument to its illogical conclusion. The end case is not that we forget history or Nazis take over, in the limit, buildings are no longer named after people.
Like if they engage in a massive domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol, and your response is to call them “great patriots” and tell them you love them? Or refusing to prosecute criminal actions because it’s “divisive” to do so?
I figured the eleven in the middle of all those exclamation marks gave it away…
I don’t think naming things after people is the worst thing in the world. I do think it’s pretty dumb, but as @MEBuckner points out, we have been doing it since time immemorial, and we as a species do plenty of dumb things. But if some day in the future @octopus’ nightmare scenario comes true and we don’t name things after people anymore, I really don’t see why that should bother anyone.
There are more than 13,000 independent school districts here in the United States. Having approximately 600 schools named after Lincoln doesn’t sound so bad.
I don’t think we’ve ever really reconciled that many people who were instrumental in the founding of the country did some terrible, terrible things. I’m not a fan of Jefferson, he was a terrible president, was entirely wrong about the future of our country, and so far as slavery goes he was a hypocrite by the standards of the die. I don’t really care what we name our schools. But I welcome this dialogue because I think we’re all better off having a more complete picture of our “heroes” from the past.
here is our local renaming
Bit late, but I couldn’t let such a ridiculous statement go unremarked.
The USA has been much more a force for human oppression and suffering than it ever has been for liberation.
But then wasnt he a traitor too? 