WHEN I WAS YOUNG, PLUTO WAS A PLANET

When I was young, Pluto was a planet.

Until it wasn’t.

There was a meeting somewhere – scientists, criteria, votes – and, I imagine, lots of coffee. And just like that, Pluto was demoted. What I had experienced as true in my childhood became untrue in my adult years without the object itself having changed at all.

We humans seem addicted to this type of behavior. A country exists for centuries, acquires borders, builds cities, creates languages, engages in wars, pledges loyalty to kings, establishes bureaucracies, composes national anthems, propagates citizens when – suddenly- someone announces it should be renamed.

Geography, however, stubbornly remains as it was. Mountains decline to move. Rivers, indifferent to political branding exercises, continue to flow as before. Ocean waves lap the same shores.

To be fair, countries may have legitimate reasons for changing names that may represent colonial histories, political revolutions, cultural distortions or restorations, linguistic preferences, or the desire of a government to declare an old chapter closed and a new one begun.

Somewhere, there are government warehouses with smoldering stores of discarded paper and folders bearing obsolete names.

Human history is a long-running argument over the designation of objects. Cities, streets, airports, lakes, monuments, buildings, oceans, constantly named and renamed. Perhaps instigated by money donated by a private benefactor, or the winds of cultural or societal appropriation, or simply the whims of heads of state.

But here’s the thing: renaming gives us the illusion of having changed history when, in fact, we have merely changed a label.

A new name can be meaningful – it can acknowledge people that have been marginalized; restore indigenous names; symbolize independence; mark an event. It is not, however, a magic eraser. Changing Rhodesia to Zimbabwe did not make a colonial past disappear. Changing a street sign does not cause the events that transpired there to evaporate into thin air.

Mountains stay put. Rivers flow. Buildings persist. People remain complicated.

We rename objects to reclaim them, correct them, politicize them, redefine them. And, really, to what end?

Pluto was a planet. And then it wasn’t. But you know what? On my birthdate, March 23, in the year 2178, Pluto will complete its first full orbit around the Sun since humans discovered it in 1930. And I say, way to go, kid – bravo!