The Great American Cootie Outbreak

This week, when the University of Delaware reported that all whites are racist, I thought about the first time I was accused.

http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2224

http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2245

by Christopher Cook

It was during my 8th grade history class when Ms. Lombardo told us that whites had enslaved blacks. She said that because we had benefitted from generations of slavery, we were racist.

The revelation troubled me a great deal. After all, my Republican ancestors had volunteered to end the slavery of men, women, and children that democrats had argued were their own private property and livestock. Some of my ancestors were injured and killed in the war. The news saddened me.

I hadn’t felt that depressed since I was caught drinking from the middle fountain at Newcastle Elementary School.One of the wrong girls had sipped from that fountain and, by the time my classmates saw that I’d touched the same knob, they spread the news throughout the entire playground! I wasn’t sure what had happened, but the consensus of laughter and ridicule made it clear that I now suffered a severe case of the cooties.

I rushed home in tears to my mother, only to have her laugh and tell me to go play.

But a http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2231 thing happened when I returned to school the next week. I discovered that by joining the anti-cootie party and not being friendly to certain classmates, I could inoculate myself against further cootie outbreaks. None of this made sense to me, but I was too desperate for the cure to ask questions.

http://www.modernconservative.com/blog/1068_The_Great_American_Cootie_Outbreak.html

2007-11-02