I’ll never figure them out

Maybe I’m not supposed to.

Legal first-generation immigrants of minority racial status, employed in unionized, “family-wage” vocations and the leftards at the University of Washington are demanding they lose their jobs.

Read that again, then click this link to read about members of the African Maasi Tribe who are working at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo as wildlife exhibit interpreters to help visitors understand the animals that come from not just the Maasi’s native continent, but which are integral to the Maasi Tribe’s suvival.

Excellent program, from what I am to understand. While I haven’t gone myself (I can see Tacoma’s Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium from my front yard), a number of my be-childrened co-workers have and they say the kids got such a kick in the pants from it that they wouldn’t stop talking about it for weeks.

Yet some uppity broad has got a group of people at the UW to scream “RACISM!!!!1!” over it, commenting that it hearkens back to when zoos included blacks in the exhibits.

Methinks she doesn’t realize which side of the bars those Africans were on back then.

But nothing more I have to say about their sheer idiocy would hold a candle to what Stephen Krival wrote in his Letter to the Editor of the Seattle Times over the weekend in response to the above linked article.

I was brought up to believe that racism is abhorrent. I spent a number of years living in East Africa in the late ’60s, where my friends and schoolmates were African, Asian and European. It was a unique time when many of us felt that almost any human injustice could be overcome.

However, I was chagrined to learn that a group of students and professors at the University of Washington, where I am now a graduate student, feel they have the right to levy their opprobrium on the Woodland Park Zoo, its visitors and a Maasai employee they could not possibly know.

If these individuals truly cannot not see the difference between equating a man with an animal and utilizing the singular skills of a Maasai to describe what life is like on the plains of Serengeti — one of the last refuges of the large ungulates of Africa and the nomadic herdsmen who have lived among them for eons — then perhaps they are just a little blinded by their own jaundiced view/racial correctness.

Where Catherine Claiborne and her teachers see a black man employed in an animal exhibit, most visitors certainly see nothing of the kind. They see a knowledgeable man, and an ambassador from an exotic land, where both the wildlife and the way of life of his own people are in danger of extinction. This is what I see, and it is what many Maasai fear.

All this is apparently lost on this myopic group of people who have unjustly accused the zoo of racism. This kind of attack is little different from the kind of ugliness we have heard from the Daughters of the American Revolution, the John Birch Society and their ilk.

So, even though I rarely go to the zoo, I will vote “yes” on Proposition 2 [which would, among other things, support the zoo], and I will make a donation to the Woodland Park Zoological Society, because it appears to be employing innovative and effective means to save wildlife around the world and fight for human rights simultaneously.