Age 4: Mommies stayed home and Daddies went to work.
Age 4: All doctors were men and all nurses were women. Women couldn't be doctors.
Age 7: That it would be best if somebody other than Bella Abzug won the race for New York mayor, because running a government was a man's job.
Age 4: It was cool when cowboys shot Indians.
Age 4: The only "Indians" in the world were the people who wore feather headdresses in the Americas.
Age 4: All "Indians" who has not yet been shot by cowboys still wore the feather headdresses ( just like the crying "Indian" in that pollution commercial ).
Age 4: It was OK to start my writing career by writing a war story ( which I titled "Men at War" ) about American soldiers killing Japanese soldiers with authentic Japanese names like "Private Choo Choo" and "Private Chee Chee."
( If I could find this story, I'd post a picture of it, but alas, I think it has been lost to the ages. To be fair, this probably wasn't an example of my childhood racism. I think I had learned about World War II, and had decided to write a story about the USA fighting Japan. Yeah, the names I choose for the Japanese guys were really questionable, but I probably did not know any real Japanese names. Anyway, what 4-year old white kid didn't have fantasies about killing Asian people? )
Age 5: The "Ancient Chinese Secret" Calgon commercial was in no way racist.
Age 5: The crows in Dumbo were in no way racist.
Age 6: The depiction of Buckwheat in the The Little Rascals was in no way racist.
Age 8: "The Mandarin" character from Iron Man comics/cartoons was in no way racist.
Age 10: The "Ming the Merciless" character played by Max von Sydow in the Flash Gordon movie was in no way racist.
Age 13: Michael Jackson and Boy George were both straight. I though they were cool, so I didn't want them to be gay. I also thought Paul Lynde and Liberace were straight, because I always wanted to think the best of people. I didn't want to think that anyone was gay, because being gay was bad. Being gay was very bad.
Age 13: It made perfect sense for the USA to commit resources to building a space defense system to shoot down Soviet Nuclear weapons.
Age 14: Ronald Reagan was the most awesome president ever.
Yeah, so the child version of me was pretty much a future Tea Party member in the making and would have loved a lot of what Donald Trump has been saying. Of course, the world has changed a lot since I was a kid, and more importantly, I've changed.
My point here is that I think a lot of the people who love Trump really haven't grown up. A lot of us grew up a culture full or sexism, racism, and homophobia, but most of us grow up, learn about the world, and realize that our childhood views were idiotic. These people didn't ...
Rich
1 comment:
this means, at age four, you knew the truth about santa and the easter bunny but you still thought that women couldn't be doctors. This is a different world now. I've known that the poor sod santa didn't exist since I was nine (i though he was real for a whopping six years! I was lying to you this whole time haha) and my mother is a doctor. Welcome to 2016.
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