Politically Correct

Source of photo

There are 49 derogatory terms for women listed in Wikipedia, including quite a number of terms I’ve never heard in my life. I do know they are all meant to be insulting and I am sorry to admit that I’ve used a few of them, mostly in the privacy of my own mind.

I’ve also occasionally been called a few of those words.

As you can perhaps imagine, I never liked the experience.

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The Pendulum

Source of photo: AZ Quotes

The nice thing about living six decades is that you start to notice patterns. You start to see that some things come around again and again. You start to see that history often does repeat itself.

When Do We Lose That Childish Wonder?

I live in a rural area where, until very recently, very few people of colour lived. This was especially the case when I was growing up in the sixties. In my earliest years, I never once laid eyes on a person who was not the same ethnicity as me. My mother tells me a story of taking me to the local swimming pool when I would have been aged 3 or 4. There was a black mother with her child and of course, with my then-blond, straight hair and fair, freckled skin, I was fascinated. After staring at the child – who would have been about the same age as me – in open-mouthed wonder for a long time, I finally asked, in a loud, childish voice, “Mom, why is that boy chocolate?”