When my 94 year old Aunt Helen is in my car there are certain rules I
honor for self-preservation:
1) Don’t talk on the cell phone, 2) Expect to be criticized, and 3) No
music less than thirty years old.
And so it was that last Friday on our way back from shopping I started humming “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught,” from South Pacific, ( Broadway debut,1949).
The play concerned racial discrimination in the Far East, and the essence of the lyric was pretty clear:
“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’s not true, you know,” she surprised me with her interruption.
“What do you mean—You don’t believe it?
“No I don’t. Everybody hates everybody, you know!”
I couldn’t believe these sentiments were coming out of the mouth of my extremely difficult, but somewhat educated aunt. She was a Roosevelt Democrat, a devotee of Robert Kennedy. And she was a Jewess that survived nearly a century of overt and covert religious bigotry. She should know better.
“Aunt Helen, you’ve can’t really believe all that! Do you hate?”
“Of course I do.”
I pressed forward: “Who?” “Why?” (Me?)
“Don’t you mind,” she uttered with a glare that declared the end of the conversation.
We drove on in silence for six eternal minutes, and when I walked her to her house she thanked me for taking her shopping.
With the front door still only half-closed I couldn’t resist:
“Aunt Helen, I love you, but you’re just wrong.”
The door closed tight.
I’ve been thinking about this for a week now.
I’ve been thinking about my family, my friends, their roots. My dad’s parents were educated; my mother’s were not. Still, I never heard a racial epithet from either. (Nor my brother) Ever.
I thought of my lifelong friend Stuart and his parents, and my sister-in-law and her parents, and even my ex-wife and her parents. Not one recollection of even one moment of hate, even in jest. That’s a lot of exposure to a lot of people over the years; I’d have picked up on something or heard something somewhere along the line. People can’t hide ill-will that well that long.
I called my brother just to see if I suffered from euphoric recall. He concurred. Hate talk just wasn’t around in our home.
There were many things our parents never taught us: To fly a kite, to collect stamps, …financial responsibility. That’s the bad news. Clearly, they could only pass on what they knew.
The good news is that they never taught us how to hate.
You see, they could only pass on what they knew.