ShareThisThere's no telling where the mind will take you.
One minute I'm tuning into the network news to see history being made with the passage of health-care reform; the next I'm recalling my brother gagging on Tabasco sauce.
On the TV, the scene is looking ugly -- protesters outside the U.S. Capitol chanting "Kill the bill!" That wasn't so shocking. But then came the racial slurs to black lawmakers, a scene that reminded me of the civil-rights era, when black children tried to enter Southern schools.
That triggered my own memories, taking me back to age 6 or 7 when I watched my mother pour a tablespoon of the hot sauce on my little brother's tongue after she found out that he'd joined the new neighbor kids in a version of an old childhood song.
Maybe some of you remember?
Eenie, meenie, miny moe; catch a tiger by the toe.
Harmless enough, except that the new kids, a twangy, rowdy passel who'd recently moved from Tennessee to our lily-white Boston suburb, subbed the "n-word'' for "tiger."
Thing was, we all knew the "n-word" was bad before the new kids arrived. But I never understood how bad before this day when I watched my brother, all red in the face and bawling like a baby, spit hot sauce and sputter that even the "f-word" had never gotten him into this kind of trouble.
"What you said was much, much worse," my mother told him before she finally handed him a glass of water.
It was a harsh lesson for my brother, but one that stuck with both of us. That kind of talk and the hatred it represented would never be tolerated in our home. Ever.
While my mother did her best to quell racism in her own corner, it surfaced from time to time when someone within our circle would surprisingly drop an ugly slur or racial joke that made for an uncomfortable confrontation and early exit for company.
Then came the mid-1970s when Boston erupted into riots over court-ordered busing.
Racism, I learned, wasn't some regional, Southern ill. It was alive and kicking in the very birthplace of some of this country's Founding Fathers, who had declared all men equal.
We Northerners owned it, even if some of us deplored the kind of mob mentality that was leading the evening news.
With ownership comes responsibility.
And so what does that mean for members of the new, rebellious Tea Party movement, at the center of the health-plan protest?
Many of them are well-educated and truly engaged in assuring that the Constitution is followed to the letter. They want tax relief, smaller federal government and honest representation from elected officials. They deplore the racial overtones that triggered flashbacks to an unsettling time.
The actions of a few do not necessarily warrant a broad brush. But they do call for my mom's Tabasco.
(Michele Miller can be reached at miller(at)sptimes.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service www.scrippsnews.com)
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