Oh, and decisions over the school mascot can incite outrage. (feel free to read the illustrious comments section).
I have a few things to say about the whole debacle (debate?)
When I grew up in Okemos, Michigan....
The street lamps always came on at night. We went sledding at a local sledding hill. My best friend lived next door and I honest to god got called inside to eat dinner most nights of the summer. I often walked to school...(uphill both ways, in fact). I went to an elementary school that fed into a middle school that fed into a high school-- a celebrated high school that was ahead of its time in its day.
When I grew up in Okemos, Michigan.... Many of my closest friends had origins the globe over. And they seemingly all spoke separate languages and practiced distinct religions. I knew greetings from their respective languages that I could use in their respective houses. I was used to different religious icons, figures and shrines. I was used to different cooking smells. Different faces. Different names.
When I grew up in Okemos, Michigan.... Parents wore the school colors, quartered oranges, sat through 5th grade strings performances without wincing, and attended conferences. Kids went to Yale, Harvard, this coast, that coast, out of state, in state, liberal arts colleges, community colleges. That is to say, kids went to college- 99% of each graduating class.
When I grew up in Okemos, Michigan.... How wholesome and American it all was.
But, in the words of Garrison Keillor, it is the little town that "time forgot and decades cannot improve." I read about the struggles that my community has had with swallowing a ban on an image that has represented it for decades and see not a community rallying for its traditions but a community stuck in its ways.
When I grew up in Okemos, Michigan, a chieftain in a feather headdress represented us although none of us, but a select few, chose it. And now it no longer represents us, though none of us, but a select few, chose that either. Mascots are not chosen by democracy. They are chosen by the spirit of the times. They are an arbitrary symbol that we do very little to understand honestly but work very hard to imbue with a sense of meaning that is entirely our own.
It is disingenuous to claim that Okemos' mascot represents Chief Okemos' image or background. If it was Okemos whose image we were trying to render, perhaps we would not have dressed the Cherokee chief in a Lakota Sioux warbonnet. Our mascot represents our blatant disregard for history. How reckless and hurtful are we to ascribe our own meaning to things that we don't understand.
I grew up in Okemos, Michigan. It is a town that shows a lot of promise. The women are strong workers, the men are good fathers, and the children are headed for greatness. But if we cannot get beyond the use of an out of date, irrelevant image that recalls the spirit of a not so faraway time when american indians were put on reservations, and forced to suffer abuses at the hands of our own government, then Okemos has lost its edge.
The town of many creeds and colors, the committed parents and their orange slices, the sought after college educations. It won't mean anything. Not if we represent ourselves, quite literally, as out of date, out of touch, and insensitive to the world around us.
Don't let Okemos become the town that time forgot and decades cannot improve.
1 comment:
BOO YA.
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