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| Joe Miner, image taken from S&T website |
After hearing news about sports team names and athletic mascots that offend people enough to be eliminated and erased from memory, we’re concerned about the future of the mascot of our local university, Missouri University of Science and Technology.
We’re proud to have that engineering campus here, a university
that started out as the Missouri School of Mines.
The teams are known as the Miners or the Lady Miners, and
the school’s mascot is a character named Joe Miner.
Of course, Joe Miner attends games to support the team,
and he occasionally is seen at community events. We enjoy watching kids react
to the big fellow.
But look closely at Joe Miner and you’ll see several
things wrong with him.
For one thing, he’s a man. We recall reading about the
controversy surrounding a “cowboy” mascot at another university because such a
character excludes the female students. It troubles us that someone might find
Joe offensive because he is a manly man. Just look at that smoothly-shaved face and that strong jaw and chin..
For another thing, he carries a pistol. This is an homage
to the days of mining in the west, we suppose, but now, a pistol-packing man on
a campus is a frightful sight.
Joe also is wearing a cowboy hat, a relic that brings up
the term cowboy again. He is not wearing a woolen stocking cap or a beret, both
of which seem to be preferred by today’s young men.
On a related note, he is wearing boots, footwear
for rough rubes. Today’s college boys wear sneakers or sandals, signs of their
gentleness.
Joe is also carrying a giant slide rule and a pick. What in the
world for? Shouldn’t he simply be carrying a cell phone -- and looking at it, both thumbs working the keys -- instead, to be reflective of
today’s culture?
And, of course, he lacks melanin.
The description of Joe on the school’s website is also
troubling to some, we fear. It describes Joe Miner as “rugged and
individualistic” and a character who evokes “the spirit of the old west and the
determination to succeed.”
Make no mistake, we here at The Ozarks Almanac like a character
that looks like a man, dresses like a man and carries a firearm. We believe in the value of rugged individualism and in determination to succeed. We also are fond of the spirit of the Old West and The Cowboy Way.
But we wonder when Joe is going to be targeted by people who are offended and replaced with someone or something more "inclusive." We wonder when the S&T Miners will be replaced by the S&T Social Justice Warriors—and what that mascot might look like on the sidelines of a football game.
Let's all hope that never happens.
