Thursday, October 21, 2004
Bill Cosby gave a tough talk to a school in Milwaukee yesterday. I think I'll memorize some of the lines and use them on my own kids.
My goodness... I certainly never had a school conversation like that with my other kids. I told her that some schools teach about God and others don't and how some people have different ideas of God and how to learn about him.
Thankfully, she never understood, I'm a poor teacher. On Wednesday morning she had Rosary, as she does every Wednesday morning. She enters the church, a tiny child, hardly taller than the pews, and walks silently to dip her finger in the font and cross herself. She genuflects, pulls out the kneeler, steeples her fingers and prays, the crucified Christ hangs in the light above her in the silence.
The other day, my kindergartner, my only Catholic School child, and I were watching Boomerang, which is a channel that shows old, old comics (like those I grew up with). In one comic, a little girl and her dog were playing hooky from school and a truant officer was chasing her. I had to explain so much about the comic... what is hooky? What is a truant officer? etc. And then the killer: Why wouldn't she want to go to school, you learn about God in school, why wouldn't she want to learn about God?"We are letting TV sets raise our children," he said. "A transformation has to take place.
"We are not going to get Jesse Jackson to keep coming up here or Martin Luther King Jr. to reappear. They've done their jobs. They gave you slogans you can use. They've prayed for you. Now you have to do it for yourselves."
He scolded them.
"I talked to Jesus the other day, and He said He's tired of you," Cosby said. "There is a book out there called the Bible. It's got lessons in there on how to live. Ten Commandments. They make a lot of sense, but you've thrown all of it out."
My goodness... I certainly never had a school conversation like that with my other kids. I told her that some schools teach about God and others don't and how some people have different ideas of God and how to learn about him.
Thankfully, she never understood, I'm a poor teacher. On Wednesday morning she had Rosary, as she does every Wednesday morning. She enters the church, a tiny child, hardly taller than the pews, and walks silently to dip her finger in the font and cross herself. She genuflects, pulls out the kneeler, steeples her fingers and prays, the crucified Christ hangs in the light above her in the silence.
