How America changes for the better
“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” said a friend to me the other day. We were talking about breaking an old habit and trying something new. I chafed as it was me that suggested trying this new thing. Yet Barrie was right, no one likes to change, including me. But we are changing all the time. Not just you and me but America. We don’t see the change because we focus too much attention on the moment and too little attention on a longer time span. And we pay too much attention to old dogs and too little attention to new dogs.
A playground story
One of the advantages of living 71 years is perspective on the way things used to be. I recall two things from a lunchtime playground incident when I was 11 years old, in 1960. The 20 boys in my class were on an ice and snow covered parking lot that served as our playground. We were playing a version of tag, with a line of 20 boys running from one end of the playground to the other starting with one boy in the middle. Whoever he could tackle would remain in the middle for the next wave. The last boy standing would be the winner.
The first thing I remember was waking up in the school nurse’s office with my mother sitting on a chair in the corner and my head bandaged. I had been unconscious for about 30 minutes. Apparently when I was tackled my head hit the ice and concrete and this had knocked me out. The nurse told my mom to take me home and put me to bed. Can you imagine what would happen to school administrators today who allowed kids to play tackle-tag on an ice covered concrete playground? Or if a head injury did occur, have no concussion protocol in place? Regarding kid safety, America (and much of the world) has changed, for the better.
My second memory IS embarrassing but wasn’t when I and others gave a full-throated “tackle red man” shout to signal the next onslaught. We were just kids and didn’t know better, just as we didn’t know tackling on concrete and ice was dangerous. But we played that game all the time with adults supervising the playground. Not only didn’t they see the concrete and ice danger, they didn’t see how offensive this term was to American Indians.
From acceptable to unacceptable
Today, Dictionary.com defines red man as “a contemptuous term used to refer to a North American Indian.” In 1994, St. John’s University changed the name of their athletic teams from Redmen to Red Storm, in recognition of both Native American sensitivity and the fact that half their athletes were women. And two years ago America’s National Football League Washington Redskins became The Washington Football Team. Pressure by Native American groups and corporate sponsors after the George Floyd killing was enough to force the Washington team ownership to do what they had resisted doing for years.
It’s really all about the new dogs
“Time keeps on slippin, slippin into the future,” The Steve Miller Band reminds us in Fly like an Eagle. From a generational perspective, time is a friend. How does a society change for the better, as America has done regarding kid safety and what language is acceptable? Regarding language, the late Political Scientist E.E. Schattschneider* writes:
Old words are a revelation of the ignorance of people, their superstitions, folly, prejudices, [and] miscalculations…
How do words, like red man or redskin, become old? How do practices like slavery or Jim Crow segregation lose their force in the world? Many, many reasons, but one sticks out when we take a generational or time perspective. Sometimes old dogs learned new tricks but more often the world supplied new dogs who learned new tricks.
Based on current death and birth numbers, 85,645,140 Americans will die in the next thirty years and 112,426,200 will be born. The 85 million who will die – most of them old dogs – will take old dog tricks – opinions, prejudices, and votes – to their graves. The 112 million who will replace them – the new dogs – will learn new tricks. Many will develop different opinions, prejudices and political preferences.
This is one way America changes and one reason children are safer today and offensive terms like red man or Redskin are unacceptable. With new people, old language and ideas are discarded. New ideas are accepted and new ways of acting toward others become achievable. And America’s vision of who is part of the American community and thus worthy of respect expands.
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*The idea for this blog came from E.E. Schattschneider’s Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of a Government.
