I had the great American brain food for dinner, macaroni and
cheese. You know, the tasty dish that looks like the brains that illustrate
magazine articles like “The Pea Diet for a Pea Brain.”
A momentary slippage of the brain cells makes people laugh at each
other, no matter how hard they try to keep a straight face. There wouldn’t be
any “America’s Funniest Home Videos” without prats in free fall.
Anybody who laughs too soon risks realizing, too late to call back
the comic decibels, that the lady who slipped on the ice is a pregnant
impoverished amputee recovering from a brutal mugging.
Reaction will be as quick as a scared cat and as lingering as a
cat-o’-nine-tails, especially if a cell phone lens took it all in for sharing
on the Internet, where rush to judgment goes supersonic. Some of us remember
public school lessons about the shame of intolerance, and the Statue of Liberty
as a welcoming symbol of a nation united, a melting pot won by Americans in the
Revolution, the Civil War, the World War and more.
Americans had a right to think what they wanted to think, even
when almost everybody thought they were wrong. There was a tolerance for bad
jokes. Sally and I once moved into a circle of folks who assumed we shared
their non-Roman religions. We heard lots of anti-Catholic jokes, and we laughed
to ourselves about dumb jokes, dumbly told. That was tolerance, letting people
exercise their right to make fools of themselves, while looking for ways to
defrost their fears and prejudice. By the way, Sally and I knew more, and
better, anti-Catholic jokes than any of our prejudiced pals.
That was a long time ago. The emphasis on national unity has
become an emphasis on diversity. The tolerance of diverse ideas, cultures and
lifestyles has yielded to insistence that nobody be allowed to say anything
that offends another.
When I was a kid we had not yet fought World War II, and we had
not lost wars in Asia and the Middle East. The population was about 123 million
when I was a first-grader in 1930. Since then it has grown by nearly 200
million. In 1930 there were no TV programs, no jet airliners, my only encounter
with air conditioning was at the movies, high speed communication was via
Western Union telegraph and its boys on bicycles. People admired cops, even as
a Jamestown Sunday School teacher kept
boys as attentive as disciples when he talked about the exciting sins of John
Dillinger and other Most Wanted headliners.
Doctors worked hard, but didn’t know a whole lot about curing
diseases. No hearts or kidneys were replaced and medical offices had ashtrays.
Kids in art classes made ashtrays for their dads. When adults chatted while
children could hear they spelled c-a-n-c-e-r and other scary words.
I’ve lived during the most interesting 90 years the planet has
known. Have you noticed how interesting the people are?
