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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Oh, but it is about the Chief |
Current rating: 0 |
by Joe Futrelle
Email: futrelle (nospam) shout.net (unverified!) |
26 Sep 2001
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Should we honor the victims of Sept. 11? Absolutely. Should opponents of racism draw a distinction between honoring those victims and "honoring" American Indians with team mascots? Damn right we should. |
Letter to the editor of the Daily Illini:
Oh, but it is about the Chief.
Shameless exploitation of suffering is what the Chief and the "War on Terrorism" have in common. Thousands of people have been senselessly slaughtered in the Sept. 11 attacks, just as tens of millions of American Indians were slaughtered by European colonialists.
Bear with me here.
The Chief exploits suffering by allowing us to imagine that we honor a people which we have destroyed, when in fact we are enjoying the leisure that having conquered most of North America affords us.
The "War on Terrorism" exploits the suffering of Sept. 11 to promote an unprecedented worldwide military and intelligence program to maintain U.S. control of the Middle East under the guise of protecting our homeland, while we conveniently ignore programs of terror instigated by regimes friendly or irrelevant to our interests (i.e. Rwanda). Countless innocent people will die in this "war," but as in the "War on Drugs," we cannot win a war against ourselves.
Should we honor the victims of Sept. 11? Absolutely. Should opponents of racism draw a distinction between honoring those victims and "honoring" American Indians with team mascots? Damn right we should.
Imagine if we changed the team mascot to a fallen New York City firefighter who would come out during halftime and dance around next to two people dressed as the World Trade Center's twin towers, and you might start to get some feeling of what the Chief feels like to American Indians. |
See also:
http://www.dailyillini.com/sep01/sep26/opinions/stories/letter02.shtml
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