As a very late baby boomer, I grew up a Redskins fan, despite two decades of recent disappointment.  In the late 1980s, as an Army officer, deployed at Fulda Germany, in the "gap" through which the Warsaw Pact might pour, I cheered the deployment of the first Apache helicopter gunships.  The Apache was to be the V Corps commander's ace in the hole: 54 airplanes that could, on their own, devastate a Red Army tank assault.  Since then, Apaches have blasted various bad guys throughout the world, flown by courageous pilots speaking English, Hebrew, and Arabic.  And that is in addition to occasionally cheering on various other athletic teams, called Indians, Braves, Sioux, Seminoles, ad infinitum, or admiring lots of other U.S. helicopters, or the Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Today's kids will certainly never appreciate these things, since by the time they are adults, Native American activists and leftist political correctness will have erased this proud legacy that honors Native American heroism and toughness.  It is only a matter of time before the Redskins' Daniel Snyder knuckles under to pressure, or the NFL – those who run it having done so themselves – forces him into it.  The sporting wear company Adidas recently promised to bribe high schools into abandoning their Native American names and mascots, lest they offend the descendants of the people they honor.   If paratroopers still shout "Geronimo!" when leaping from an airplane, they won't in a few years.

What Native Americans have to consider is what will really happen if the left, which claims to defend aboriginal people, has its way.  In twenty years, cleansed of being named for weapons and teams that honor their sacrifice and bravery, Native Americans will not even be an afterthought to most Americans, or anybody else on Earth.

In North America especially, Native Americans are respected and honored almost exclusively for resistance to European encroachment, against which, despite the odds, various tribes like the Sioux, Apache, Cheyenne, and Nez Perce fought skillfully and valiantly.  But absent this resistance, those tribes lived fairly ordinary and miserable Neolithic lives, fighting brutally among each other; wasting forest, plain and mountain, and the wildlife that lived there; and generally leading a hierarchical, patriarchal, primitive, and unremarkable existence.  When they got horses, metals, and firearms, they ravaged one another and nature all the more viciously, as every people has done throughout history.  What they did not do for the many millennia of world civilization before the white man came is touch or influence the rhythms or ideas of the rest of the Americas, much less the world. 

By forcing modern Americans to abandon the honors that they willingly give the aboriginal peoples of this continent, Native American activists and their leftist helpmates will guarantee that within a generation or two, no popular memory of these otherwise brave and worthy people remains.