I am willing to sacrifice the fun of the dunk tank and petting zoo for a deserving reason.  Perhaps if students had made complaints because they felt excluded because of the history of the dunk tanks. Or maybe if the animals we petted were suffering because of us and looked unhealthy.  But none of those things happened.  

The reason for the removal of these traditions was the discovery of a couple of web articles that painted them in a negative light.  

I’ll remind you that if you look back far enough or scour the web hard enough, you will find something bad about nearly everything.  For example, an early version of Coca Cola was made with cocaine.  Does that mean that we should ban Coca Cola from the County Fair?  Of course not.  A rudimentary version of the dunk tank was sometimes used in a racist manner, but it’s not anymore, in the same way that cocaine is no longer mixed into Coca Cola.  

Racism is worse than cocaine; I’m just trying to say that there is a difference between a product’s primitive roots and its current usage. And if having a “racial history” merits removal, we should be removing a whole lot more than dunk tanks from our lives.

As for County Fair’s petting zoo causing “inadequate bedding,” or “lack of shelter” for the animals, I find it petty when you compare it to the millions of cows on factory farms executed on conveyer belts to give us meat.  By the way, we have burgers for lunch here every week. I like beef, and I am no PETA member–I’m just saying that if we want to go that animal-activist route, we can be a lot more helpful than stopping a few from being pet.  Or if there is another motive, if Parker justs wants to get rid of stinky animals defecating in their parking lot, they should tell us the truth instead of a story about animal cruelty concerns.

In short, there were no complaints from the students, no issues with the animals–no issues until we created some.  We created solutions to problems that didn’t exist, and it ended up taking some fun and tradition out of County Fair.  Parker should focus its progressivism in other areas where it would be more useful.

Axel Burlin ’18