As you might expect, I get a lot of comments. Most respond to a blog entry or someone else’s comments. Sometimes it’s not clear what the writer has in mind. And then, as you might suspect, there are lengthy missives from certain parties, filled with scorn for me (and many of you), bursting with indignation, and dripping with self-rectitude.
Now, if I simply wanted to attract more readers to the blog, I’d approve each and every one of these comments, if for no other reason tan to see the commenters in question double and triple their visits here to see what’s happening. We’d all have a good laugh at their expense, but we’d be giving these folks the attention they crave and are unable to secure in any other way. Over time, indeed, these rants have become so predictable (and some of them seem to have been lengthy labors of love) that the folks who compose them don’t seem to understand that I glance at them, see that it’s the same old same old, and consign them to the oblivion they so richly deserve. It isn’t even worth reading these rants, because this is how they sound to me:
Nor is there any reason to respond to these histrionics, because that would look something like this:
So why waste my time? It’s enough to know that they are wasting theirs.
So keep those comments coming!
Believe it or not, what the adults sound like in Charlie Brown is how my kids said they sounded when they were very young. Charles Schutz was a genius (I am assuming that this was his idea?).
It could also be the soundtrack to some faculty meetings I’ve attended.
One more thing, as a true Florida southerner growing up as a child, I listed to my grandparents’ and great-grandparent’s prejudiced views on blacks. One grandfather died believing that eventually there would be a race war (he was from Philadelphia). None of it made sense to me and went through one ear and out the other. We had black maids that took care of us after school and learned that they were loving human beings just like everyone else. Being from the south in a time of busing the civil rights movement is not an excuse to become like that. Perhaps it was because I went to socially liberal Methodist Churches as a child, I am not certain, but neither my brother or myself ever accepted these shackles on our minds.
When my brother was in college in Texas in the mid to late 1980′s, he would hear from Texans that no black quarterback could lead a team to a Super Bowl win. And even though he is a die hard Washington Redskins fan, even before he could say “what about Doug Williams?”, the Texans would say Doug Williams did not count because he had such a great offensive line. Sad.
I was a kid when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home run record. No one in the family was a particularly die-hard baseball fan, but I still remember being taken aside and having it explained to me why Aaron’s record didn’t really count. Not a word was said explicitly about Aaron’s race — that would be far too vulgar in our household — and it took me a long time to figure out what was going on there.
I was born in a family without racists. In fact, everyone I knew growing up yammered constantly about how much they hated racism and bigotry and what about civil rights. Maybe someone over 60 wouldn’t understand. I often regretted it, since unlike the boomers I can never tell (and retell) stories about how I was morally superior to my parents.
Just curious, what does age have to do with it? I am well over 60 and grew up in a staunch conservative home, played with the Black kids in the neighborhood, and found out in high school that my parents had given them clothes, and food. My folks were married at the start of the depression, right out of college. I asked one time about the curious mark on our front stoop. They told me hobos put the mark there, and it meant you could get food at our house. We moved out of town and into the country when I was six, and my father replicated that sign on our new stoop. Before he passed away he boasted to me that he never missed an election and never missed an opportunity to cast a Republican vote.
I understand there are sections of this country where that same growing up situation would have still happened but with a dose of racist hate thrown in. I understand that it is not restricted to one section of the country. But like I keep saying on these boards, there are times when it is just right to put things away and move on.
I listened on my first transistor radio when Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points against the Knicks, and woke up the family yelling after he hit the century mark. I hold Hank Aaron in the same esteem that I hold the Babe. I could never grasp the difference. They both were superb ballplayers. That is all that mattered.
I learned from my parents that people were people, some good, some bad, some smart, some not so smart, some wealthy, some dirt poor, and those were differences. Black and white? No difference. One thing I love about the Internet is that you can make friends with people and not even know what color their skin is, because it just doesn’t matter, never did, really, and needs to stop in the tiny minds where it still does.
rcocean, it was not a very pleasant thing to live through. I knew fathers and sons who didn’t speak to each other for years over this and witnessed bitter fights among people who otherwise loved each other. Alsways on the table as though it countered any integrationist arguments was “how would you feel if a N—– got a job over you” .
“Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Except for some occasional humor or entertaining incredulous statements, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy proponents can be best summed up by the words of the Bard.