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Melting Pot - Blue Mink
How many of you remember Melting Pot by Blue Mink? Let me remind you of the chorus:
What we need is a great big melting pot
Big enough enough enough to take
The world and all its got And keep it stirring for a hundred years or more
And turn out coffee coloured people by the score.
It seems to me that our world, our tolerances for other people, other races, other religions and even other sexual orientations, is being constantly stirred and mixed and accepted. Each generation takes it one step further. It can be confronting for us, who have been raised in a delineated society, to be admonished by grandchildren. Words, terms, names and sayings that we grew up with are being used to label us as being racist or sexist, when often no offence was meant, intended or taken.
It seems a shame to lose our history, our pride, our stories and our humour by prohibiting the use of so called "Ist-isms". I, for one, have no problem being called a Pom or Pommie - (it is supposed to an acronym of Prisoner of Mother England). My brother takes great pride in being called a "miserable pommie b-----d"
There is enormous fun in using some of the alleged attributes of certain races, religions or sexual types in jokes or stories, and fortunately, most of us find humour in those attributes of ourselves when we see it.
Somehow, in prohibiting the reference to differences between groups, we are denying their individuality, their personality, their right to be different. We have gone beyond saying everyone is equal, and strayed into everyone is the same. No mention must be made of any characteristics that makes them different (How dare someone in the Royal family wonder aloud about the possible colour of the skin of a bi-racial royal child!) but we must make allowances for the fact that they are.
The Melting Pot idea is working very well, we have lots of coffee coloured people but the stirring is too vigorous - it is addling the brains.
