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
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.
ReplyDelete