Strange Times Indeed part two

There are times when I do a blog that I know exactly what I want to say and the initial words just bubble out with relatively little work; there are times when I only have a glimmer of what I want to express and it can take well over an hour to get out a measly 500 words. Then there are times when I think I know where I want to go - but somewhere along the thought process I go in a completely different direction - one that frequently leaves me feeling dissatisfied. My last blog was like that.

I wanted to talk about how absolute in our judgements our society is becoming; of how we seem to be unable to look at the whole person, but rather we fixate on one event and assume that we know the person. It feels as if we will never be able to forgive the people who use to be our role models, our idols, our elected leaders.

It needs to be stated clearly that there is no doubt that all of our politicians in the last 200 years have been both racists and sexists. Even the most enlightened suffragette was racist. It was how the elites were educated - and those who aspired to be of the elite - copied their manner and attitude. I do not think we should ever forget how their beliefs and their mind-set shaped the policies and actions that they were engaged in. It does not particularly matter that they may not have done it intentionally or with malice - their acts were damaging to people different than them - people they deemed to be less than them. Those acts have had long-lasting consequences, consequences that we need to deal with and is some fashion remediate. But I am not convinced that we need to toss those public figures away, to tear down their statues or in the case of current political figures to bar them from ever running for office again.

My high school had for a number of years in the early 1960s a "Negro Minstrel Show". While I was too young to participate, I do remember attending at least one or two of the shows. In all honesty, if I had been older when the concerts were happening and if I could sing - I would have probably been delighted to be a performer. Should those high school students - some of who would be in their 80s now, be condemned for dressing up in blackface and singing what we referred to as negro spirituals almost 60 years ago as a racist? It clearly would have been profoundly offensive to anyone who was black, it clearly was inappropriate. But before we evaluate those young people, do we not need to look at their lives in the past 60 years? Have they by act and word atoned for their misguided acts.

Similarly, I am willing to bet that the vast majority of young men who went away to university in the mid to late 1960s had very little sensitivity to issues that now consume us in terms of race or gender. There is no doubt that young men like me said things that were horrific. We used language to describe people that would have been offensive (I have never used the "n" word) to those people. The fact that we did not realize it was wrong - is irrelevant. We said it and we should be ashamed.

My attitude and responses to women were no better.

But if you are only going to judge me by my participation (and enjoyment) of a concert 60 years ago where high school students wore black face, or by my use of language (and the attitude/lack of sensitivity that went with it) then you will have missed who and what I am. Instead, I would rather you judge me by my friends, the people I have worked with and the vocation I chose to devote my professional life to. Perhaps even more importantly - judge me by my children and their friends.

Don't judge me by what my parents and community taught me about what is okay or not - judge me by what I taught my children.