Training the revolutionaries of the future
Colleen’s family has been visiting this past week, including her new four-week-old nephew. I’ve never spent much time with babies - or any time, really - but as they go, this one isn’t half bad.
I’ve decided to train him to be a revolutionary. He’ll be the first self-identified male feminist in the family! He’ll be Vice President of Cunt Cuntry! And as my first act of revolutionary training, I’m singing him only progressive lullabies. So far, I’m only really familiar with one progressive lullaby - “Everything Possible” by the gay a cappella group The Flirtations.
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The criticisms of my students would serve as a good warning to visitors of Seeworthy: she talks too fast, she's too hard on us, she assigns too much work, and you have to be a dyke to get a good grade.
In other words, I'm a big, fat, queer, feminist meanie, and I am totally out to get you. Graaagh!
My husband and I don’t plan on having children, but we’ve always speculated how they’d turn out on the off-chance we fuck up big time and get pregnant. We think any child of ours would rebel by becoming a conservative christian in their teen years.
Ouch, talk about a worst-case scenario! The kids thing is on C’s and my radar, but I like to take an optimistic view that it’d be biologically impossible for a kid raised by two an interfaith, fat feminist dyke couple to end up a conservative Christian. Hopefully they’d just get lots of un-original tattoos. One can always hope, right?
my daughter is actually way more conservative than I am!
She’s definitely not christian though, and probably would get very original tattoos
And I love that lullaby!
Generally, when I nanny, the more conservative the family, the more fantastically liberal the songs I sing. This one, whose father is a business consultant and whose mother is a minister (a nice one, but slightly naive - she doesn’t believe that anybody sleeps or walks around their house in underwear, much less naked), has gotten labor movement songs, some Ani DiFranco’s more lesbian-centric songs, and anything liberal, socialist, libertarianish, about drifters or crooks, or about social injustice via classism. Mostly. And 90’s alternative rock.
don’t suppose you’d know where I could get me that track?
I grew up listening to liberal “hippy” music. I knew some great feminist songs and anti-war songs. I wanted to be a revolutionary.
Then, I hit my teen “rebellion” and became the annoying kind of fundie Bible thumper who gets high on Christ and hands out tracts hoping and praying to save souls.
I got tired of having to disengage my brain just to function, so I’m back to being a bleeding heart liberal tree hugging hippy hairy feminist.
Wow, I guess I could just say that when most kids were in college experimenting with alcohol, drugs, and their sexuality, I was in college experimenting with Conservatism.
So, don’t worry when the kid experiments with stuff you couldn’t prevent. That’s what kids do. Just make sure he has the tools to experiment as safely as possible. (If it was actually safe, nobody would do it
That’s at least something good to hear, Twilight.
Melanie (and all), I think it might be available on iTunes, but if not you can definitely buy the album (Live Out on the Road) from Amazon.