Hi Tweeters,
I agree with Gary. I'm Jewish and I'm a birder. I'm also an
anthropologist who studies various traditions around the world and their
importance for maintaining continuity for cultures and subcultures. It's
been called the Christmas Bird Count for more than 100 years. It was never
used in a discriminatory fashion nor was it intended to be exclusive, as
far as I'm aware. I'll keep calling it the CBC. Now, I'm off to go
pishing on Schmuck Rd. in Sequim.....
Good birding,
Lonnie Somer
Seattle
On Sat, Nov 28, 2020 at 8:27 AM Ken Trease <
krtrease at gmail.com> wrote:
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👍 well said Gary
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Sent from my iPhone
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On Nov 28, 2020, at 8:19 AM, Gary Bletsch <garybletsch at yahoo.com> wrote:
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Dear Tweeters,
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May the name "Christmas Count" remain. It's called a Christmas count;
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there's nothing wrong with calling it such.
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When I was a kid birder in New York, most of the older birders who
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mentored me on my first CBC's were Jewish. None of them had any beefs (or
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porks!) with the name.
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It would be hard to find anyone on this planet who loved Christmas more
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than I did as a kid. I was the last one on the block to stop believing in
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Santa Claus. By the time I was sixteen or so, however, the excesses of the
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season began to inflict their existential nausea upon my spirit. Those
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excesses have multiplied to a staggering degree since then. My revulsion
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for this annual cacophonous glut can hardly be expressed.
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Last December, I made my escape to South America, where I detected nary a
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hint of yuletide mania until about the 20th of December. Glorious! I was
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all ready to make it an annual habit when the pandemic came along.
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Even so, the Christmas Bird Count is one of the few things that I do like
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about December-- other than the beginning of lengthening hours of daylight
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in our hemisphere.
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My objection to the suggested name change, then, is not because I want to
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put the "Christ back in Christmas," or because I want to fight a rearguard
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action against what some call "the war on Christmas."
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Far, far from it! I just don't like this penchant for taking a belt sander
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to anything rough or nettlesome in a word or name. I characterize it as a
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misguided attempt to protect tender feelings, bordering on the
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self-righteous. Such rechristenings always remind me of *Brave New World,* where
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all of the steeple crosses had their tops sawn off, turning them into
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capital T's, in honor of Henry Ford's Model T automobile. How Orwellian!
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Yours truly,
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Gary Bletsch
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