Of Thee I Sing

“......with liberty and justice for all.”
So we pledged each and every day. We had every reason to believe it was true. Our homes were warm and clean, we had toys and food; every comfort our parents could provide. No one refused to serve us or keep us from the front of a bus- just because. We did not have to defer to anyone, we could go anywhere we pleased- just because.
South Jersey wasn’t Alabama or Mississippi. It wasn’t the back roads of the deep south, but it may as well have been. The shacks of the black families of Jericho and New Sharon echoed the poverty and social stigma of the sharecroppers in Louisiana or Tennessee. We passed through these communities in our family car, but we wouldn’t notice, we’d never see. There were walls in this country; invisible, insidious boundaries we did not dare to cross.
The Puerto Ricans who worked the farms were also invisible. They were labor and should be grateful for whatever came their way. We passed them by as they toiled in the soil and the sun without giving them a moment’s pause.
The ignorance and the hatred was passed down to us from our parents’ parents’ parents and beyond that, a legacy that was understood: that’s just the way it is.
We prayed the Lord’s Prayer every day, without regard to anyone’s beliefs, no concern for Jews or Muslims or atheists. In public school everyone was a Christian, like it or not.
Religious and public leaders railed against our culture. Rock n’ Roll was the “devil’s music”, it was “nigger music,” and listening to it would make your sons and daughters rutting, savage beasts.
Comic books created juvenile delinquents, and so did wearing dungarees and T-shirts.
We could save ourselves from a nuclear bomb by ducking under our desks or lying in a ditch. Radiation wouldn’t hurt you as long as you lay low and covered your head with your hands.
Lucy Ricardo couldn’t say she was pregnant on TV, lest we realized that she and Ricky were sexual beings.
Cigarettes were good for you. Doctors and movie stars told us so.
There were dirty little secrets in every family tree, hushed up to maintain propriety.
But we were changing. Without knowing, our parents were molding us to be different, to believe in the spirit of America. Our teachers opened our minds to the world, and gave us the intelligence we needed to begin making all the right choices, and to reject the hypocrisy and the ignorance. Television, that vast wasteland, would open our eyes to the harshest of realities. More and more of us would stand up in the decade to come and deny the lies and the glossed over truths of our happy youth, and the monsters in our nation’s closet would come tumbling out for all the world to see.