Don’t wear dead birds on your head

From Miami Herald

The Herald Editorial Board has had its differences with President Trump, to say the least. Arming teachers, an idea he has so resolutely pushed in the days after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is just one more.

We suspect that the president is not fazed by yet another ideological breach. But there are groups out there, some of whom he claims to respect, who, like we do, think giving teachers guns to subdue a killer in the chaos of a mass shooting is a dangerous idea. Maybe they can make a persuasive case to the president. We’re with them.

Police chiefs are weighing in. James Craig, who heads the police department in Detroit, is in favor of arming some teachers. He proposes a thorough vetting process, and if the teacher is ex-military or a former law-enforcement officer, so much the better. We think that’s a big, and in many schools, possibly an insurmountable “if.” New York’s police commissioner, Bill Bratton, called arming teachers “the height of lunacy.”

Law enforcement professionals, generally, want to leave the firepower to the pros, ensuring that there are properly armed and trained officers on site, the egregious lapses of Broward Sheriff’s deputies assigned to Stoneman Douglas, notwithstanding. We don’t believe that’s the model others will follow.

These concerned parents and students need to be heard, but they best take it up at the state and local levels.

Here’s what VoteVets, a progressive veterans organization tweeted about arming teachers: “It increases the chance of kids dying in crossfire, adds to confusion with SWAT teams trying to identify an armed assailant and greatly increases odds of an accidental shooting.” They ought to know. As awful as the idea of a shooter armed with a semi-automatic, or automatic, rifle is, layering chaos over mayhem is, incredibly, even worse.

In a speech Friday to CPAC, his base, President Trump crowed with the certainty of the clueless, that, “A teacher would have shot the hell out of him before he knew what happened,” had an armed adult confronted teenage killer Nikolas Cruz at Stoneman Douglas.

Teachers aren’t buying it. They’ve got enough to do besides take down a deranged gunman. They’ve proven their bravery time and again in such school shootings across the country shielding their students, as three late educators did in Parkland, with their bodies.

No, let the pros do the protecting.

Thank Harriet and Minna for all the birds at your feeder. In the 1890s fashionable women wore hats that were so ridiculous that Harley riders would have been jealous. These so-called fashionable hats were made out of freshly killed backyard birds.

For hundreds of years people had worn a single feather in their hats. The feather-in-your-hat fad can be traced to such notables as the Pied Piper and Yankee Doodle. Birds never were thrilled with this idea, but a single feather in a hat was something they could live with. Then about 1890 it all went wrong. Women decided that if one feather was cool, wearing the entire bird was really stylin’. So instead of a feather or two, an entire bird was sewn onto the hat: feet, beak, gizzard and all.

Things were so bad by 1896 that a New York ornithologist spent a day on a street corner identifying the birds that passed him on the sidewalk. His bird list included bluebirds, hummingbirds, orioles, warblers and owls. That one day he counted one hundred and seventy dead birds riding on the tops of one hundred and seventy hats.

That year a Boston socialite and bird lover named Harriet Hemmenway decided enough was enough. She called her cousin Minna Hall, and together they organized a series of afternoon teas. At the teas they suggested to other Boston ladies that birds belonged in trees, not on women’s hats. The other ladies agreed and the Massachusetts Audubon Society was created. The mission of the organization was to discourage the use of feathers for ornamentation and to promote the protection of birds.

Harriet, Minna, and their friends were not the minimalist, earthy tree huggers of today. They were part of Boston’s upper crust. However, upper crust or not, they were still women and in 1896 women were anything but a powerful political force. They couldn’t even vote.

The women of the Massachusetts Audubon Society may not have had much power, but their husbands were very powerful and Harriet and Minna knew how to use that power. Soon the word spread that the fashion industry was destroying our native bird population. And within months Audubon Societies were popping up all over the country — all with the same mission. In 1900, just four years after Harriet and Minna started their afternoon teas, the Lacey Act, which banned the transportation of dead birds across state lines, was passed. It was the first of a series of laws protecting birds. The most important of these laws, the Migratory Bird Act of 1913, has saved many backyard birds from extinction.

Keeping dead birds off of hats might seem like a no-brainer today, but in 1896 it was no easy task for the two women from Boston. Killing birds for the millinery trade was a profitable business and the bird protection acts put a lot of people out of work. But with this one cause, Harriet and Minna were not only at the forefront of the conservation movement, they also made a statement for a fledgling women’s movement.

If turn-of-the-century women wanted to be taken seriously by men, they could no longer walk around with their heads full of hummingbirds. STANLEY TATE