This is Day 354 of 15 Days to Flatten the Curve. Deb and I are well on this Friday.
Bonus points to everyone who looked at today’s headline and immediately thought of Rogers and Hammerstein (and not the myriad pop covers since). From its premiere in 1949 and through the Fifties, the musical “South Pacific” pissed off a lot of people for its portrayal of interracial relationships.
The song “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught,” sung by Lt. Cable to his island girl, didn’t pull punches:
You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear
You’ve got to be taught from year to year
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught
It was courageous at the time, and righteous, to point out that no one is born a bigot — prejudice is learned, a product of culture and upbringing. As a society and as a country, America has come a long way since the ’40s. But those Broadway lyrics still ring disturbingly true today:
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade
You’ve got to be carefully taught
Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You’ve got to be carefully taught
In this unmade America, our children are being carefully and formally taught to hate and fear. Thanks to “critical race theory” and other pseudo-intellectual bilge, the indoctrination is in full song.
If I had a child in grade school today he’d be taught to hate himself, to be ashamed of the color of his skin, to construct a complex of guilt with no basis in reality. He’d spend the rest of his waking hours in a society busily replacing equality with the misbegotten “equity.”
Despite the hue and cry over “institutional racism” attributed to white Americans, it’s indisputable that quite the opposite is true. There’s no getting around that. To the extent that hate is encouraged and endorsed, we know its source.
That hate is being “carefully taught” to our kids.
When I posted the rundown of what we accomplished on the bus Wednesday, I neglected to mention that we’d function-tested the large awning that deploys from the curb-side slide. It’s something we hadn’t tried since picking up Ernie in November, and we needed to check its operation before the anticipated maiden voyage.
I pressed the awning-control switch inside the coach and watched the canopy unroll — but to my dismay the arms didn’t extend. Trying to retract it didn’t pull the fabric back onto the roller, so I took my finger off the switch and broke out the stepladder. Turns out the mechanism was binding and in need of a few shots of silicone. A few extend-retract cycles later it was working just fine.
Rain arrived earlier than expected yesterday, but it quit long enough for me to finish getting the fresh-water system online. I drained the bleach-and-water sanitizing solution (about 80 gallons of it) from the holding tank, then re-filled it about halfway and turned on the water pump.
Inside the coach I ran each faucet, cold-water only, one at a time. Once the chlorine-bleach odor was gone, I went back to every fixture to make sure that there was no air remaining in either the hot or cold lines, and then I turned on the electric water heater. (We’ll test the LP-gas function this weekend). After waiting a half-hour for its ten-gallon tank to come up to temp, I confirmed that we had hot water in the shower (the fixture closest to the water heater).
Finally, I went back outside and topped-off the fresh-water tank — done.
Right about that time it started raining again. I love it when a plan comes together.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath