You've Got to Be Carefully Taught

I haven't mentioned this yet, but I'm in grad school. The class that I am taking right now is about diversity, prejudice, and discrimination. I have spent the last two days quoting Rodgers & Hammerstein's "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" for various assignments. The message of the song is true. We are shaped by but we learn at home. Lately I have been thinking about one lesson I learned at home more and more ...

I grew up in a very tense household, but unlike other houses, the tension wasn't between my parents but rather, caused by my grandmother. My grandmother lived with us from the time I was one until I was 14. She was a very unhappy woman and she was verbally abusive on a daily basis. Whenever my parents got some extra money together or time off from work they would take my brother and I away on a trip so we could escape. They wanted to us to have happy times. More often than not we ended up at Walt Disney World ... hey if you want to be happy where else should you go but "The Happiest Place on Earth"?, but we would also take crazy drives to D.C., Amish Country, Annapolis, Chincoteague, and Williamsburg. We kept this practice up even after my father lost his high paying job when I was 13. Dark times have followed us for years, and even though it was fiscally irresponsible we continued to travel. These experiences have left me with a few things: 1. An extreme wanderlust and a very long list of places I want to see; 2. a desire to flee to somewhere else for just a little bit whenever the going gets tough; and 3. the belief that it isn't crazy to drive three states over just for lunch.

Right now I am going through one of those times where nothing is going right and I just can't shake the cloud of doom that is hanging over me. I want to flee, because hey, that's what I have been taught to do, but I am a little more responsible. I know I'm broke and I don't want to add to my debt, so instead I stay sad and continue to read about places that I wish I was at instead of here ... and I dream and I dream, and hope that sometime life will be better.