blogHOUSTON is getting very concerned about the Chronicle‘s editorials. Well, more for the readers who actually read the things. Today’s lecture appears to have been authored by Tolerance.org:
This week the University of Houston hosts the 13th annual Prejudice Awareness Summit. The seminar is designed to discourage racial tensions and violence among teenagers and encourage cultural understanding. It could not come at a better time. Only a week has passed since the conclusion of an especially bitter presidential campaign in which some partisans condemned tolerance and understanding of others as moral relativism.
The Prejudice Awareness Summit was founded by Houstonians Laurie Bricker, once president of the Houston Independent School District board and now a member of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, and Phyllis Kalmin. Both women are longtime members of Jewish Women International, which sponsors the event. Middle school students from Spring Branch Independent School District will attend today. HISD students will attend the Wednesday and Thursday sessions.
The summit throws students into an interactive environment with others from varying backgrounds. After the event, the students are encouraged to establish year-round anti-prejudice programs at their schools. Despite Houston’s relatively congenial cross-cultural milieu, such programs still are needed.
The musical South Pacific contains the darkly comic lyric “You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late/ … To hate all the people your relatives hate/You’ve got to be carefully taught.” Houston’s Prejudice Awareness Summit, supported by a long roster of Houston’s corporations and foundations, tries to undue [sic] some of that careful instruction.
That’s deep. Gosh, what a public service, because there really is so little tolerance and understanding these days.
All right, what is that last paragraph about? The editors take a song from the movie South Pacific and say that this tolerance and understanding summit is needed to “undue” (I’m fairly certain that should be “undo”) the “careful instruction” demonstrated by the…song lyric. Huh? Looking for some reality here. Maybe MeMo wrote this editorial. Actually, that could be accurate.
The editors tell us that this teen summit (that makes me shudder – I have a teen, I was a teen, therefore, I shudder) “could not come at a better time. Only a week has passed since the conclusion of an especially bitter presidential campaign in which some partisans condemned tolerance and understanding of others as moral relativism.”
Sigh. Those hayseed red-staters, who are known to be completely against tolerance and understanding, are trying to wreck all the tolerant progress America has made. But this teen summit will fix the damage – damage that is best demonstrated by using a song lyric from the movie South Pacific.
Bizarre is an understatement.
These kids would benefit more from a full day spent in their classrooms working on their education.
