Imagine
that you’re a foreign high school student from France. You get a
chance to go to the United States and spend a year living with a
family in Buffalo, New York. One of the first things you notice your
first day of school is the image of an electric chair worked into the
tiles in the entryway.
You
quickly learn your way around and friends invite you to a basketball
game on the weekend. When you get there, you see that all the players
are wearing images of an electric chair on their jerseys. You are
told it’s the school’s emblem, chosen because a well-known
professor from what is now the State University of New York at
Buffalo invented the method of execution and the symbol evokes local
pride.
If
this scenario strikes you as bizarre, then imagine you are a foreign
high school student
from Japan. You are from Fukuoka, not far from Nagasaki. Your
grandparents were living in nearby Kokura in 1945, the site of the
intended second atomic bomb drop. Because of bad weather, the planes
dropped the bomb on Nagasaki instead. But for the cloudy skies, your
grandparents would likely be dead and you would not exist.
You
get a chance to go to the United States and spend a year with a host
family in Richland, Washington. One of the first things you notice
your first day of school is the image in the entryway of a big R
surrounded by a mushroom cloud. You learn that Richland is the location of the Hanford Site, a nuclear production complex and home of the B
Reactor,
the first full-scale plutonium
production
reactor
in
the world. The mascot of Richland High School is “The Bombers” and one of
the cheers at games is “Proud of the Cloud!”
The
electric chair is something to be proud of. It kills bad guys when
the time comes to kill bad guys.
No
reason why you can’t use it as a high school mascot, is there?
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