Ok lets review:
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-R0FTfkPAQ[/youtube]
Zeit, you may as well have gut punched me with that link.
This stage and screen production was written in the 1950's. I did have the music album for the music but it was not for years later that I learned out what they were singing about, had no idea what a social disease or a social worker was. Wasn't until the early 1960's that all or most all my questions were answered by reading Readers Digest.
Finally in late 1960's the Movie came out on TV and it enthralled me. When I visited or lived near City's the Dance number for the PR woman of " Only in America '" would come to mind, Damn that Rita Moreno was FANTASTIC.
I do believe this production was a major influence on my interest in different cultures. Later Fiddler on the Roof and 1969, Hair, and Jesus Christ Super Star, I believe had these productions been done as dramas they even South Pacific would have flopped.
The music and dancing, the catchie tunes we would hum or whistle, this was the door to understanding at least for me.
Busing for students in Boston came at a time I was not living on the east coast, the actions of the Southey Irish against kindergartner's, little 5 year old kids was so incomprehensible to me, Big burly Irishmen banging on the sides of their school bus, shrieking obsentities at these little kids so small some had to be helped up the step to get on the bus.
I tried to put myself in the place of a minority and having to send my baby to school and face a howling mob of Grown ups spitting on my child, attacking the Bus, Dear LORD, what will happen to the impressionable minds beyond terror of those of another race, how long for a child to calm down and feel safe in school, what happens at the end of the day when they have to go through the same darn thing just to get home away from these Monsters.
Busing had so many down sides, take a child to a school out of their neighborhood and parental involvement is now limited, parents cannot walk at will to the schools for parental conferences or be there a couple days a week to be part of the PTA. Loss of neighborhood involvement in the kids education, the beginning of disadvantaged parents being able to monitor the schools 20 miles away. Outside of neighborhood schools parents had no idea who was teaching their children, did the teachers have any idea of the traditions, religion, and street life their students faced every day of their young lives???
Question I never heard if this worked both ways, were the children of the middle class parents bused into Ghetto schools? Did the innercity schools suddenly become 50% white, if so I wonder how the white parents felt when the Separate but Equal worked, how they felt about having a child transferred simply by the color of their skin into schools that were in no way equal to the schools in the Burbs.
Both sides were a product of Crazy people that put their agenda ahead of the children. Separate but Equal was nonsense, was back then still is today. There is no way a majority in the innercity will have 1/4 the benefits of schools in the burbs.
I will never forget in California when my eldest was in first grade. On a parent teacher conference I was yelled at as I had taught my daughter to read and the teacher said I should have left it to the school system to teach her the correct way. She was the only one in her class that could read and she made her class mates look stupid.
Not even going to get into it when the new math came in, darn her father was an instructor at the Nuclear Power school and Math was his subject. He looked at her books for teaching this new math and was WTF, no memorisation of the times tables etc. Her second grade math books confused the heck out of him.
