To the editor:

Thank heavens the Professionally Outraged Class has finally turned its attention to Pinckney Elementary School. For too long have the city’s schoolchildren been forced to lay their precious eyes upon this horrid name!

But if we are now set on tearing down the symbols of the old regime, then I assume the sans-culottes of this breathtakingly self-righteous city will now turn their enlightened attention to the other oppressive school names? Take Kennedy Elementary. How dare we name a school after a president who did not want the March on Washington to take place and whose family fortune was surely built on the tripartite monster of patriarchy, colonialism and racism! Or New York Elementary. How dare we tolerate an appellation that so clearly celebrates the colonial invasion of indigenous lands of the northeast!

But why stop there? Surely the Mass St. Robespierres will go after the city’s name itself? Amos Adams Lawrence, by his own admission, was in favor of compromise with the South until 1854! How could we celebrate this benighted view in the form of our fair city’s name? And does not the name of our state itself smack of rank cultural appropriation?

Will the Professionally Outraged not look up from the Prius dashboard and see the injustice everywhere around us? And here I thought this was an enlightened city!

R.M. Stangler,

Lawrence

Editor’s note: Kennedy Elementary School is named after Opal Jayne Kennedy, who was a longtime Lawrence educator.