Archive for December 24th, 2009

Turtle Egg

I had an FBI dossier before I was 15. In 1956, kids at my high school would yell “Federal Troops” when they saw me in the hall. I had said that the Feds would HAVE to use Federal troops to enforce integration (to desegregate means to de-separate and nobody every “deseparated” anything).

As BoardAd told me, there is one truth to the old statement that people don’t think because they are coddled. Most people DO have it a lot easier than I did and they CHOOSE not to peck at the egg shell that protects them. In our day, there is an eggshell’s worth of difference between saying EXACTLY the right thing and breaking that cocoon completely.

One commenter made a really brilliant statement about the passive-aggressive nature of humor. I get a laugh out of people actually worrying themselves sick about how to use the Only True Term, African-American, to apply to a runner from Kenya.

I remember when one of our unbiased networks in the 1960s did an impartial survey among blacks about what they wanted to be called. That was when liberals were trying to hang on to the term “Negro” so, lo and behold Moses, it turned out that blacks said that was what they wanted to be called. A long-forgotten conclusion was that “Some wanted to be called Afro-American, and the least popular was he schizophrenic term, ‘African-American.’”

So, as I pointed out, most people prefer to stay in the egg or, said Freud, in the womb. The ones who make it to adolescence and stay there think they have really matured.

But if you are out there as I was, and I don’t think it was a choice, your egg cracks early and you grow a new shell, very SLOWLY.

This turtle would have had a MUCH easier life if he stayed in his egg.

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