Ken said -
> Would I
have experienced it differently if I'd read it at Fordham Prep--a Jesuit
high school--in those years? Perhaps. <
I spent twelve years in a Jesuit school, and never heard a bigotted word against any other group or religion in that time - from the priests, that is. One of my best buddies until he was 12 was Jewish. His father then banned him from knocking about with us. (He owned the local cinema, so there went all our freebies ) (That 'boy' later married a devout Catholic from Asia ...)
I went forth into the wide world with both eyes innocently open. It was my ears that were shocked and polluted by the bigotry - racism, sexism, homophobia, agism - around me.
I was a lucky man to have had such a balanced and gentle upbringing. Perhaps it was blinkered. Maybe I just wasn't listening and heard what I wanted to hear, but the men I still know from that dim past are generous men of social conscience.
Andrew
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