I don’t wanna talk to you no more, you empty-headed animal food trough wiper! I fart in your general direction!Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!
Thus it is that Mony Python has summed up my sentiments of my youth. When I was 14, I was beaten viciously at South Shore High School in Chicago. The reason was that I was Jewish and the perpetrator was a first generation Palestinian classmate of mine. He broke me of ever attending a gym class again and I was one of the very few Jewish kids in my school who flunked Gym.
So, off I went to preparatory boarding school in New Hampshire. There I was to be nestled amongst my Christian peers from the Eastern US. Those fine young men introduced me to a whole new level of anti-Semitism. They had new derogatory names for Jews I had not yet heard. Out of the frying pan and into the fire Mum, (an informal British English term for mother).
Man I worked up some serious hate for religion. I asked my minster pals to put their crosses away when I would visit them in their offices. I felt like a vampire when I would get too close. But through the actions of people like Rev. Steve Swanson and others who helped the social service agency I founded in 1976, Local Motion, I began to heal, slowly. Years of 12 step recovery helped me to see religious people in a more generous light.
But politics and religion do not mix for me. I do not hate Palestinians anymore or Christians. But I will resist this wave of sentiment to define the United States as a Christian country. Posturing itself as defenders of the good religion against the bad religions. It is only a matter of time before Jews will once again be the official bad religion.
Monty Python, “Noooooobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”
