Change Richland High School's mascot from 'Bombers' back to 'Beavers'
- par: Dmitri Stone
- destinataire: Richland School District/Richland High School, Washington State, USA
Richland High School in Richland, Washington uses a nuclear bomb
explosion, or a "mushroom cloud," as a school mascot since 1945 to
celebrate the end of World War II in Japan via the dropping of nuclear
bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing tens of thousands
of civilians. The city of Richland is located a few miles south
of the Hanford Nuclear Site, which helped make plutonium for one of the
nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. Use of the mushroom cloud painted
on a bomb as a mascot has been the subject of intermittent controversy.
In 1988, amidst visits by Tom Brokaw (NBC Nightly News) and Japanese
delegates, a vote was taken by the students making the Bomb (with the
R-MushroomCloud logo) the official mascot of Richland High
School. This needs to change, although dropping the nuclear bombs
on Japan to end the war there is thought of by most to be the best
solution to ending the war with Japan, it was still not a good solution
because of it's immediate human, environmental, and physical
devastation. A symbol representing that kind of destruction is
not a proper mascot for a public high school; also, it is insensitive
and demaning towards the civilians that died in Japan from the nuclear
bombs that were dropped.
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