As Meghan noted earlier this week, it seems that the YMCA will be dropping the MCA from their name. Men? That became politically incorrect ages ago. Christian? Hardly a factor in their programming for decades. Association? No problem there, but YA doesn’t make any sense.
I’m fine with the change. After all, it reflects the reality of the venerable organization that, like so many creations of the Protestant Establishment, has become part of the Secular Establishment.
But I enjoyed the incoherent boilerplate put forward by Jim Dickson, a local YMCA, er, Y head in Tennessee. To reassure folks, he told the local TV station: “We’re going to change our logo and change the way we talk about what we do, but the core of what we do will never change.”
Huh? What we do will never change? Last I checked, the Y changed a great deal of what it did over the last fifty years. (One one thing getting rid of male-only events and facilities would count as a pretty big change.)
I think Mr Dickson meant to say, “What we do will never change, until we change what we do.”
Notes on Anosmia
One morning several years ago, as my wife, Wendy, and I were having breakfast together, I had…
Empire of Unreality
Shiva Naipaul (1945–1985) was the author of three novels and two books of mordant dispatches from places…
The Dreadful Christ of Pär Lagerkvist
It’s dangerous to meet a god,” says the disgraced Pythia in Pär Lagerkvist’s The Sibyl. Her observation…