changing the world.. one mouth at a time
Changing the World.. one mouth at a time
What comes outta your mouth? It is bad enough with the garbage we sometimes put into it. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a filter that works for garbage going in and especially for some of the garbage that comes out? A prime example right now is that guy running for president in the country next door to us.
We all have prejudices of some kind or another. We love certain foods or not.. We either like thongs or hate them. It can even come down to dog lovers or cat lovers, or in my case neither. Please don’t send me hate mail, those thongs are for the young and the restless.
A recent conversation with a fellow from down south, kind of caught me by surprise. He referred to Mexicans as ‘wetbacks’ and forgive me my naiveté but didn’t we deep-six all those horrible racial slurs years ago?
I am not a purist by any means and I catch myself sometimes referring to ‘Indians’ before it is quite out of my mouth.. and changing it to ‘First Nations’. I happen to come from a place where we have a lot of ‘First Nations’ peoples, in fact, they will outnumber the rest of us in my province within 50 years if birthrates continue the normal pattern of today.
I also have close relatives in this group and who the heck knows what my ancestry is for sure? Back in the day, we had immigrants from other countries and that’s how most of us came to be here. I remember they were calling them DP’s which stands for displaced persons.. at least that’s how I understood it, but it was said in a derogatory way!
The country south of us has ‘Native Americans’ and ‘blacks’ and that is as far as I will go here. I dislike any slang references to an ethnic group of people. I don’t like being referred to as a bohunk or hunkie or even uke, because I have Ukrainian in my blood.
Some also refer to people of my descent as perogys.. well I happen to really like perogys, if you called me that then I guess I would just say “Eat me!” If you happened to be Tom Selleck, insert happy face here.. but I digress. Anytime I can get Tom Selleck into my blog is a good day for me : )
As the times change, we need to change with them. We can’t change the world or even other people’s opinions. We CAN CHANGE what comes out of our mouths though. We can also speak up when someone uses racial slurs and let them know we find it offensive, which I always do.
…and maybe, just maybe.. we can have our own little part in making this a better world for our children and their children to come, one mouth at a time.
Sept. 7th 2016
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