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The case for the Yerba Buena (Good Herb) Pot Heads instead of San Francisco 49ers
mining
Hydraulic mining employed by the Forty Niners destroyed Sierra foothills, sent millions of tons of debris as well as silt into rivers and out into the San Francisco Bay and led to many areas being scarred even today.

San Francisco — a city so dedicated to political correctness that three election cycles ago there was a groundswell of people trying to unseat Nancy Pelosi as they claimed she didn’t meet the limits test of being liberal enough — is an embarrassment to the self-righteous whitewashing history using Year 2020 hindsight to do so.

While Dreyer’s Ice Cream dropped their brand name Eskimo Pie like a hot potato and statues of Christopher Columbus are falling faster than you can say “the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria”, San Francisco is still clinging to names that are offensive to the political sensibilities of our times.

Topping the list is the San Francisco 49ers. How could the birthplace of the Sierra Club that helped spur the environmental movement that has given as the climate change gospel dare honor those who raped and plundered Mother Nature on a wholesale basis in search of gold?

The 49ers washed away hillsides, dumped chemicals into California’s waterways, damaged Sierra forests, and put into motion the extinction of the California Grizzly Bear and pushed others to endangered status. Their legacy has poisoned San Francisco Bay for more than 170 years. Those that were brought to California to profit off the 49ers filled in close to 40 percent of the bay destroying estuaries and wetlands with abandon.

So how can a city that prides itself for believing they are always on the right side of every environmental issue allow a professional sports team carrying their city’s name with a mascot honoring a group of people who conducted the ecological equivalent of genocide on large swaths of the Sierra?

Come to think of it San Francisco per se is not inclusive when it comes to a name as it is named after a Roman Catholic saint. It would seem an affront to those of other religions that they’d be forced to say they live in the City of St. Francis. And heaven knows how militant agnostics and atheists must feel knowing that the government is honoring a Catholic icon. Surely revisionists can argue it is a violation of the separation of state and church.

Yerba Buena — the Spanish word for “good herb” that was the original name given to the settlement that grew into a city founded by Spanish invaders and then Mexican occupiers who stole California from the indigenous people and even enslaved them — is much more PC and apropos. After all, the Summer of Love in 1967 helped forever cement another herb we know as marijuana into the American conscious or at least the country’s altered state of mind.

What better way to embrace the revisionist and self-canceling craze sweeping the nation than for San Francisco to go back to being called Yerba Buena and having its pro football team known as the Pot Heads?

That way the city can be politically correct when they cheer on the Yerba Buena Pot Heads against the Cleveland Browns — a Midwest NFL team that has two problems. First, they are from Cleveland, and second who in 2020 will believe the team was named after co-founder and original coach Paul Brown and isn’t meant as a slight to those that might be Latino.

Further soiling San Francisco’s status as both as a PC and as a sanctuary city is the homage paid to John Geary and James Polk by naming streets after them. Geary was the city’s first mayor and Polk was a United States President.

Polk was elected to office on the promise to essentially take over sovereign territory of Mexico by either peaceful means or by armed force. Polk used provocation by sending American troops into the Mexican territories of what is today California, New Mexico, and Arizona. Mexico, defending their territory, fired the first shot. That was enough to get Congress to declare war on Mexico.

The war included one Colonel John Geary who was among those inflicting heavy losses on the Mexican army and an inordinate number of Mexican civilians all so American citizens who had taken up residence in Mexican territory could be part of the United States.

It’s laughable that the outraged activists of San Francisco get worked up into a frenzy about parts of the city being named after Christopher Columbus and the fact the city has a statute of a man they see as committing genocide against the indigenous people of the America but they don’t even make a peep about public streets that honor those who killed innocent civilians as far south as Mexico City just so they could force a treaty that glossed over the fact that the United States essentially decided to seize the land of a sovereign nation simply because they wanted it.

You would think that in a place like California where a case can be made that Hispanics have endured more injustices in some ways than Blacks that revisionists would be manning the barricades to erase all mention and honors of men that participated in a war this country provoked in order to steal territory fair and square.

It’s amazing, isn’t it? Even the patron saints of one of the most politically correct cities in the land aren’t without sin when viewed through a kaleidoscope with the current cause du jour that merges history while removing context.

San Francisco, in the lingo of 2020 self-righteous activists, is essentially occupied land that wasn’t even stolen fair and square from another people. Its grandness was built on the environmental savagery perpetuated by the Forty Niners.

Today a lot of San Franciscans that believe they stand for purity and good will on Sundays during the late summer, fall, and early to winter cheer on a team that carries the name of a city that celebrates a Roman Catholic saint who clearly wouldn’t buy into the Pro Life doctrine and other beliefs that aren’t what one today calls “San Francisco values” and has a mascot that glorifies a group of primarily men who arguably directly committed the most extensive environmental damage ever in California from a single event in state history.

At the same time they triggered secondary environmental onslaughts that razed redwood forests that had been saplings 400 years before Jesus Christ was born and led to the building of dams and water re-engineering that PC environmentalists argue is killing California.

The San Francisco PC generation must repent and cleanse the earth of any homage to men like Geary and Polk as well as the 49ers who are no longer judged by what good they did but acts of evil as  seen in the rear view mirror of those piloting today’s politically correct steamrollers.

Yes, erasing all traces of anyone who has ever committed a transgression real or perceived is how we should change the world by sanitizing history instead of doing the hard work and reaching out to others to change hearts.