I noticed that Children’s Fairyland changed their sign—not the big one by the main entrance, but the one close to the lake, at the top of the grassy slope where people sunbathe. It now reads Ohloneland.
Look, I know this is a sensitive topic for some people (and I mean no disrespect for the Ohlone). You can’t walk two blocks around downtown without seeing graffiti that says “stolen land.” The charge is that White colonial settlers “stole” Ohlone land (and all other Native American lands, I guess). It is technically true: White settlers and their governments did seize the tribal lands they occupied and upon it they formed their farms, villages, cities, states and, eventually, the United States of America.
But what are we supposed to do about it now?
Do the people who scribble “stolen land” on sidewalks and walls expect Oakland or California to return all the lands the Ohlone once lived on? Let’s get real. That’s not going to happen. It’s just another fantasy on the part of social justice warriors, like cash reparations for Black people. So if returning land to the Ohlone is a complete impossibility, what’s the point of making a big deal about it?
Virtue signaling, that’s what. That’s all it is: a way to express sympathy for the Ohlone. And I have no problem with that. I feel sympathy for pretty much everybody these days. The problem, though, with this particular form of virtue signaling is that there are some really unstable people in Oakland who take this stuff seriously. They’re the same people who voted for Pamela Price and Sheng Thao, who think that police are thugs, who hang Black Lives Matter signs in their windows, and who insist on teaching little children that structural racism infects America.
In other words, the kinds of people who are complicit in bringing Oakland down.
The message the far left consistently sends is that this country is evil. But it’s not. In terms of human rights, the U.S. has been no worse than any other country in history, and far better than most. We’ve made plenty of mistakes, but the genius of our system, and of our people, is that we eventually realize the error of our ways. We’ve done that for women, for Black people, for Gay people, for disabled people, all of whom were once discriminated against, and then we do our best to make amends and move forward.
But there’s no way of making amends to the Native Americans who suffered from European imperialism. We can do token things, like giving them a plot of land somewhere to make into a park. We can declare indigenous people’s day and celebrate it. We can appreciate their culture and arts. But let’s face it, ownership of the Bay Area isn’t returning to the Ohlone people.
It’s fine to remind people that where Oakland now sits, indigenous peoples once hunted and fished, made love and had children, and communed with their gods. But in another sense this is just another sign of the grievance progressives seem to carry with them everywhere they go. They’re always angry about something, always looking for the next cause du jour. They have no solutions, but that doesn’t stop them from complaining. It gets tedious. I’m not asking for the new sign to be removed, but I do wish the left would lighten up in their obsession with “disenfranchised people.” Everybody’s disenfranchised in one way or another. We all hurt. Most of us learn to deal with it and move on.
Steve Heimoff