An Opinion
Elsewhere on our site, we’ve got a quote from the Warsaw Independent in 1906 which says, in part:
“While our people have a veneration for religion, yet they do not countenance the idiosyncrasies of people who, self-appointed, make a farce of religion by grotesque acts and ignorant speech.”
We dearly love that sentence. The Cincinnati Times-Star liked it so much that they ran it by itself as an item in their 1947 Centennial Edition. And we think, what a shame that some people of Boone County and the State of Kentucky do, absolutely, countenance the idiosyncrasies of people making a farce of religion by their ignorant speech and their ignorant, grotesque museum of faux religiosity in Bullitsville which is so justly mocked and ridiculed by the civilized world.
And the presence of that abomination is all the more grotesque when you consider that a mere ten miles away, is Big Bone Lick, a subject of utter fascination by the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and the entire scientific community of those days. Did you know Jefferson had Big Bone bones spread out all over what is now the East Room of the White House to study them? Did you know one of Jefferson’s goals for Lewis and Clark was to scout the area, bring back reports and more bones? Did you know scientists from England and France and other parts of the globe made pilgrimages to Big Bone because of early finds there? Did you understand that findings at Big Bone caused some scientists, for the first time in history, contemplate that there might be such a thing as extinction? Big Bone was - and is - famous, world-wide. World. Wide. Did you know Big Bone was famous before Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton ever saw it? Did you know an early developer of Ludlow Kentucky managed to get his hands on enough Big Bone bones to hold a successful auction in London, England, of hundreds of these bones? The demand was huge. Big Bone was one of THE topics of European naturalists in the 1700's.
So Kentucky can’t fund a decent Museum to honor this spectacular site of early Americana, virtually the birthplace of American paleontology, where at least five species of extinct animals were discovered for the first time, while the ignorant forces making a farce out of religion can build a grotesque monument which is proved fallacious by every bone ever dug at Big Bone?!?
Really, we should be embarrassed.
And do not even get us started on what happened to all of bones from Big Bone. . .