Posted on 10/29/2003 4:14:07 AM PST by stainlessbanner
A friend of mine, who happens to be of the hippie persuasion, ran up to me with a big grin on her face.
"Did you hear the news?" she asked.
This friend is a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, so she loves to squawk about animal rights. She gets a thrill out of protesting zoos, circuses and other kinds of diversions, and she is a diehard vegan. Her shenanigans make for great comic relief, and her newest soapbox is no exception.
Apparently PETA has petitioned the town of Rodeo, Calif., to change its name because the word "rodeo" represents "egregious cruelty " to animals. PETA suggested adopting the name "Unity" instead, and pledged to donate $20,000 worth of veggie burgers if the town goes through with the change.
As if that weren't enough, PETA also wants to change San Francisco's Hunters Point to "Gatherers Point."
When I heard this news, I laughed so hard that my friend almost choked on her soy milk.
These are the same cuckoos who tried to get Hamburg, N.Y., to change its name to "Veggieburg," and they also petitioned Fishkill, N.Y., to change its name to "Fishsave."
(Never mind the fact that Hamburg is named after a German city, and Fishkill is named after the Dutch words for "fish creek." Apparently PETA still thought they were insulting to animals, even though no animals seemed to complain.)
Luckily the people of Rodeo have some sense in their heads, so they rejected the idea before you could say "tofu."
"I'm not going to sell out for a veggie burger," Doug Boyom told the San Francisco Chronicle. "I'm not going to sell out, period."
It's good to know that, in this age of political correctness, some people still have sense in their heads. There's nothing wrong with trying to bring about social change, of course, but we should never turn our backs on our heritage. We have nothing to gain — and everything to lose — if we try to whitewash our history.
If we were going to rename Rodeo, we might as well rename Los Angeles. Granted, this name has nothing to do with animals — as we all know, it translates to "City of Angels" — but it's politically incorrect anyway.
It has a lot of religious connotations (gasp!) and it hearkens back to a time of Spanish imperialism.
This place was named by a group of Catholic missionaries who camped here in 1769. They were traveling through California to find locations for religious settlements.
If our city was really P.C., it would probably be named "Yangna," because that's the name of the Indian village that was here before the missionaries arrived.
Or it might be called "Bahía de los Fumos," which is what the first Spanish explorers called the place. In English, that means "Bay of Smokes," which is a good moniker if you think about it. It describes our smog problem perfectly.
But we wound up with the name "Los Angeles," giving us a constant reminder of the city's missionary past. That past definitely has a dark side, because the missions all but wiped out the native tribes who used to live here. Even so, it's part of our heritage, whether we like it or not.
It's true that, in a lot of ways, our city's name seems weird today, since there aren't many angels left around here. We do have a few residents who get deluded into thinking they're vessels of the Lord, so they dress in white robes, spout off loony rhetoric and start a new religion. But they're not really angels, they just think they are.
The fact of the matter is that our city's name is a link to our past, and the same thing holds true for almost any place name. The town of Rodeo has its own heritage, as does Hunters Point. We should never lose sight of that, and we should never whitewash it.
So if you've got a political soapbox, whether it's animal rights or anything else, make sure you're sensible about it. Don't throw out overblown, loony ideas like renaming a town.
It's not going to accomplish anything except to make you look bad. Political correctness is not the way of the world.
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