mm:
The TEd is to differentiate between me and my evil twin teD, who hardly ever shows up here, but causes lots of strife when he does. (The truth is that I fat fingered it when I was first registering here and didn't notice it until after I'd complete the registration process.)
I didn't consider the site repulsive, because it was so patently a put on, but it seemed to me just a waste of time by whoever built it because it just isn't going to get through to those whom it is skewering. And my social conscience desperately wants to reach those ultraliberals and bash their heads together with some reality.
My earliest childhood school memories are of Tappan Elementary School in Tappan, NY, where there were a couple of hundred children, of whom 95% were white. I remember thinking about the black kids that they were just varying shades darker than I am.
That changed when our familymoved to the very small town of Burke, Virginia in the mid-50s, right at the time of the massive reactions to integraion attempts. On my first day of school my brothers and I got on the bus and started off for school. I asked the kid sitting in front of me why we were going by the elementary school about a mile from where we lived. He replied, "That's the colored school, stupid. They ain't good enough to go to OUR school." You could tell just from looking at the outside that "separate but equal" wasn't working.
We've come a ways since then, but the covert racism and stereotyping is much more difficult to eradicate. I just finished reading "Blinded by the Right" by a guy named David Brock, and was astounded by the prevalence of hypocrisy in the right wing here in the US (just as I am astounded by the paternalism and underlying hypocrisy from the left wing!) BTW, I recommend "Blinded..." to all of you. It's a very interesting journal of a man's journey to self-awareness. I had a problem or two with Block's writing style at times, becuase he builds very complex sentences that take away from the message. (Don't know ANYONE else who does that!)
TEd
