One

On Friday, Aitch and I were roughhousing on the couch, and he wrapped his hands around my throat. I told him nicely but firmly that we NEVER put hands around someone else’s neck, because it could hurt them.

“No, Mommy, it’s okay,” he said. “Look, I’ll show you!”

He ran to the kitchen and brought back a section of The New York Times. “See?” he said, pointing to this photo. So I had to explain to him in a roundabout way that the man pictured was not a nice man, and he was not caressing the pretty lady so much as testing her neck to determine the strength of the blade required to bisect it.

I knew I would have to talk to him about sex and violence in the media, but I was thinking more along the lines of vixens depicted in comic books, not historical figures depicted in the Times.

Two

Another section of the paper contained an article about the selection of a new school board member in Bethlehem, PA, a town not far from where I grew up. A Hispanic gentleman stood for election, but a white candidate was selected, and citizens were debating whether or not the outcome was motivated by racism. One woman said this:

‘We certainly need diversity,’ said Johanna Bees, a Republican committeewoman who spoke outside the city library. ‘But the school board had to consider qualifications first.’ Ms. Bees paused and then added: “One of my gripes is that all these people should learn English. When they’re walking down the street and they’re jabbering in Spanish, that really annoys me.’

You have to love that quote. We need diversity…but maybe not SO diverse that they actually walk around, you know, speaking other languages.

Memo to Pennsylvania: It is possible, even preferable, for people to be bilingual. Just because you hear someone “jabbering in Spanish,” that does NOT mean he is not fluent in English. If you ever traveled or even moved to another country (not that you would; Pennsylvanians are some of the most home-bound people in the nation), you would certainly speak your native language when you got the chance. And don’t tell me that your parents/grandparents/great-grandparents who were immigrants spoke only English. They certainly spoke their native tongue to their peers, even if they did insist on English with their children. That, by the way, is a tragedy, not a virtue. If your family had encouraged their kids to speak German as well as English, Mrs. Bees (and I’m betting it’s German), then maybe you wouldn’t get the willies whenever you hear another language spoken on the streets.