P's Parents and the Parents in "yhe Secret Integration and Ernie in BE too

[ish mailian]

On Children
 Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 1:40 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> So recently a thread about P's parents repeated the same old slaner
> about his mother and father, the same old stupid gossip heard decades
> ago about how his mom, a catholic,  hated Jews and how she drank and
> how his old man was a Nassau county conservative and how he may have
> come to forgive them their politics, good church going boy that he was
> and all.
>
> But the fiction does deal in parents and in kids a lot. Not just the
> so-called family stage of his career but all of it. And one common
> enough theme is how the parents try to impose their political
> ideologies on their kids throug education and books and media. And the
> treatment of young minds as childish, and the treatment of Blacks and
> Others as Objects, as Problems, as pawns in the game.
>
> I mentioned this TSI essay, a damn fine essay on the subject so here
> is the citation.
>
> Boulter, Joe. "Children and Slaves in the West: Imagining Fraternity
> Among Outlaws in 'The Secret Integration'."Oklahoma City University
> Law Review 24.3 (Fall 1999): 518-533.
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