Hacking at some racist trees

If a tree celebrates Presidents Day in the forest, does it make a sound? And at what point do we care?

I guess it depends if the tree’s of voting age? It’d seem significant if the tree’s potential for civic engagement weren’t limited to a small circle of soil. Or if anyone else were around to be inspired to a newfound respect for the office of president by the oak’s fervent patriotism.

But let’s set trees aside for the moment.

Holidays, like public monuments and the political blogosphere, are stubbornly fixed set-pieces in the ongoing stage production that is our society.

They are prominent, largely unshakeable features of the structure in and through which we go about our lives. Like trees! And like trees, they’re only relatively stable because we’ve stuck them in the ground good and tight, and ignoring them is easier than buying a chainsaw on a college budget.

Unlike trees, however, holidays, statues and buildings named after Ku Klux Klan organizers are man-made. Thus they only really “do things” when we celebrate or regularly attend classes in them.

So what’s a holiday do if it just sits on campus and gets ignored? Does Presidents Day do something to us simply by existing — even though we didn’t get a day off to contemplate its significance and nurse our snow-weekend hangovers?

We’re conscious of it, so that’s something. And a lot of states use it to celebrate just George Washington and Abraham Lincoln’s birthdays, so maybe that specificity mixes things up?

Alabama excludes Lincoln and celebrates Washington and Thomas Jefferson’s birthdays — even though the latter isn’t until April. Presumably because that other president presided over one of the greatest periods of death and violence in American history?

(At least they’re not celebrating Andrew Jackson — I think the irony alone would be enough to kill me, or at the very least uproot thousands from the land they’ve lived on for centuries and force them to march thousands of miles so white settlements can expand comfortably.)

So Presidents Day must have some symbolic value in shaping how we see our society. But what about holidays like Labor Day? We get a day off, so it must be significant, but does it play a role in shaping our values or ourselves?

Probably not, because until the age of 16 I’d never considered Labor Day to be about anything beyond pregnant ladies and obscure fashion codes. (I had to check Wikipedia to be sure it’s actually about the American labor movement. It is.)

We actively celebrate Veterans Day, but that’s a tree we’ve altered over time. (It used to be Armistice Day — so a bit more about “peace” than “soldiers.”) But what about Columbus Day?

And while we’re on the subject of memorialized racism, what about all these Confederate legacies and quiet monuments to racism scattered around our campus? Lingering relics of an ugly past slowing our moral march forward? Useful symbols of injustice to rally around (e.g., the Pit Preacher)? Dead metaphors like Labor Day?

I’m undecided. But if we get a consensus going I’ll chip in for a chainsaw.