By Bill Bradberry
Niagara Gazette
NIAGARA FALLS —
I just loved story time when I was a kid, in fact I still do. Though history has supplanted my fascination with talking animals and fairy tales, I still appreciate a good, well-told yarn every now and then.
Even well documented history comes to life when a good writer fills in the blanks with plausible conversation which no one ever actually recorded, but which we can only imagine might have been said under the circumstances.
I mean, who really knows for sure exactly what Abraham Lincoln might have uttered just before and immediately after he delivered his famous Gettysburg Address, or what Christopher Columbus must have declared when he realized that he was slightly off course ... we can only imagine.
Fables really captured my imagination, you remember, Aesop, Thurber and those guys?
Moms and teachers would read to us, “The Sky is Falling,” and “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” and in my home as we got older, instead of watching television we read for hours especially on rainy days, great stories like “One Thousand and One Nights” over and over again until the characters and the fantasies became real; the morals of the stories became law.
I became a Superman and Batman comic book fan, reading and trading with my buddies, at one point spending every extra dime I could scavenge on the collection that I often wish I had saved. It might have been worth a small fortune today.
Like my hard earned baseball card collection, they all got away from me.
My sisters read Archie, Veronica and Betty comics, each having their favorites and talking about them as if they were real live people with attitudes and opinions.
Some of the stories and their characters helped to supply us with a societal code of conduct, or even a moral compass; a way to bolster the rules our parents, teachers, preachers and neighbors were trying to get us to live by while we were still young and somewhat impressionable.
It was obvious through the tales that, for the most part it is better to be good, to be honest and to play fairly by the rules. The consequence for misbehavior was almost always painful, so it was usually better to avoid the pain and reap the reward for good behavior.
My sisters reminded me recently about how I used to tell them stories late at night while we were all supposed to be asleep in our beds.
From my room at the end of the long hall, at their persistent requests I whispered and hissed all sorts of scary tales about monsters and ghosts creeping around outside in the still of the night, trying to get under their beds.
But until they heard a happy tale of ice cream and candy-land they just would not go to sleep. So, just about every night ended with them sound asleep with smiles on their faces and me checking under my bed.
By the time we got to high-school and college, our interest in comic books had waned though I did discover a new appreciation for Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” and George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”
I had discovered political satire, and the whole fable thing took on an entirely new meaning.
And it was probably about the same time that I began to struggle with the concept of labels, especially when it came to people, principles and politics.
I had learned the effects of calling people names as if to label them for life, names like liberal, or conservative ... democrat, or republican ... un-American, or patriots, and of course the worst thing anyone could be for decades, a communist, or a fascist.
I was just seven years old in 1954 when the Congress finally censured the Wisconsin Republican capping the ill famed “McCarthy Era” after his rants created a legacy of fear, intimidation and crippling suspicion that lasted an entire generation, ruining reputations and hurting innocent people for absolutely no good reason.
Mom and dad had taught us that calling people names was wrong, that labeling someone was unacceptable; that it made you worse than the person you were labeling.
We had heard it enough.
We had names for gay people, names for nationalities and lifestyles, but we were taught not to use them, that everybody is equal and deserving of respect as human beings.
Far worse than labeling anyone, is simply lying about them.
These days it is way to easy to do irreparable harm, to actually cause tragedy by lying or spreading labels and lies about people. In fact a whole new genre has emerged via the Internet, something we have come to know as “cyber bullying” a form of harassment that has led to terrible consequences for some, including suicide.
In its wake, a few states, including New York have reacted by introducing laws to prevent it and to target bullying in school as well as online.
But, like anything else, the laws cannot substitute for good moral judgment which should and can in most cases be first and best taught in homes, in the neighborhoods and in churches as well as the classrooms in my view.
And just as dangerous, if not more so, are the vanishing lines that should distinguish facts from fiction and opinion in the ever growing multimedia world we are so immersed in.
The ever louder lack of civil discourse is, at the very least disturbing and at its worst, a growing danger to the very principles we stand on as human beings and as Americans in particular.
It would be wise in these coming days to lower our voices and listen more closely to what we are saying, remembering the morals of the stories and the differences between the fables, the labels and the destructive forces of the lies.
Contact Bill Bradberry at bill.bradberry@yahoo.com.
