Second Grade Logic and Whiskey Wisdom

Professor J,

Combining your idea with a coffee house (can we add a bookstore?) is a great idea. Meeting and talking with people NOT like them, as you point out would go a long way towards a society of real tolerance and understanding, not just the surface political correct nonsense we are often confronted with now.

I was giving a tour recently at the art museum where I'm a docent and had a class of second graders, all African American. While discussing a work of art one pointed out something of interest to him and the other docent asked which person he was referring to. "The white one." he said. His friend elbowed him and said "Caucasian!" I later pulled their teacher aside to ask if that was what they were being taught to say. She said that the teacher of the class they belonged to was especially sensitive and she didn't allow them to say "black" or "white." I found that interesting since the exhibit they were touring was, Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey, featuring works of art created by the artist, an African American, in which the classic story of The Odyssey is retold through collage. Bearden's version of the epic tale is reset in the Caribbean and the characters are all cut out of black construction paper. The paper can't be African American can it? There's a fine line between being sensitive enough about things to be able to discuss them, yet not so sensitive that we can't.

Does changing the terminology impact behavior in any meaningful way or just make us all more uncomfortable and/or easily offended? Of course all language used to dehumanize or deliberately insult is never acceptable , but innocent descriptions from second graders, that really aren't offensive at all...maybe we should let those slide.

Your entire quote by Phil Williams sums up our issues and why it isn't likely this culture (cue John Wayne movie soundtrack) is going to get as far as solving them as some other countries.

Took a little weekend trip to the Jack Daniel's Distillery and on the tour the guide explained that the government use to send down 5 "revenuers" (this was the term used for tax men everywhere we went in east Tennessee) and they lived together in one house to oversee the production and make sure all the taxes were being collected. It was a rotation set up. Every few months whoever had been there the longest would be sent home and replaced by a new person. The idea was to keep enough people on site long enough to understand how things operated but not long enough to make too many friends, be open to taking bribes, or become alcoholics. That actually might not be a bad compromise to what we have now in Washington. Stay long enough to be effective but not long enough to get too comfortable inside the beltway or make too many corporate friends you are going to want to employ you later on.  It might keep us from this "throw the bums out" mentality we experience every few election cycles.

Seriously, if the whiskey makers don't know how to run things then I give up. :)