>>>I agree with you that other issues are far more important, but I've also been the little kid in school feeling even more like an outsider than usual as everyone around me sang "God Bless America," which I'd never before that day.
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>>Yes, I agree that introducing a song like "God Bless America" into a schoolroom is problematic. Probably a plot by the religious right.
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>I didn't say it was a plot. I said it excluded kids. (It's also a terrible piece of music, but that's a whole 'nother story. <g>)
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>>In fact, the composer also wrote "White Christmas" - Do we see a pattern here?
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>Another terrible piece of music. <s>
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>>Had he used his birth-name of Israel Isidore Baline little Waspy kids like me may have felt excluded - so he kindly copyrighted "God Bless America" as Irving Berlin < bg >
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>Yes, I know it was Irving Berlin and I know he was born Jewish. What's your point?
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>Tamar
My point was that exclusion can be in the mind of the beholder. I get that singing Onward Christian Soldiers in a public school would definitely be in bad taste and certainly would make a whole lot of kids feel excluded. But I didn't get why you felt excluded by "God Bless America" - a pop song written in 1939 by someone of a similar ethnic heritage which never mentioned anything religious besides a reference to a monotheistic ( and anthropomorphic ) vision of a deity which, while you may or may not have personally embraced it as your own conception of the numena, would certainly not have seemed so foreign to anything you had been exposed to by virtue of your background that you would naturally feel excluded.
Just seemed like a bad example of victimhood. Especially when there are so many good examples of boneheaded stuff foisted on children in public schools with no regard for their feeling or the sensitivity of children to feeling left out. I think we are in agreement that it is not the role of the public school to create situations where the majority of children have further opportunity to make other children feel different and out of place and inferior to an eternally imposed norm.
That is what advertising is for, and it will be much more effective if children have no opportunity to be immunized to it when they are young.
Charles Hankey
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
- Thomas Hardy
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm-- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
-- T. S. Eliot
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
- Ben Franklin
Pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
