| ...of the parts of South Africa where HIV is rampant--as I've noted elsewhere. In these areas, HIV is commonly contracted through birth. Tell missionaries tending to their needs otherwise, and they will verbally cut you off at the ankles, leaving a pair of smoking stumps.
Diabetes has at times been treated like a "dirty" disease. Nowhere is this more obvious than in my wife's family's unwillingness to talk about a great grandfather of hers, who spent his last years in a mental hospital--suffering from what was most likely an advanced case of diabetic psychosis![1] Since the symptoms took the form of mental illness, which was, for long ages, treated as "dirty", this became the family's "skeleton in the closet".
You're right, at least, that Sesame Street is so PC that it goes down like a pound of saccharin; but you're mistaken about the risk to your putative child: an HIV-infected child--or any other immunosuppressed person, for that matter--is at far greater risk, playing with "healthy" children, whose hygeine habits are often deplorable.
As for the Pledge of Allegiance, its author, Francis Bellamy, (a Baptist Minister, no less!), wrote it as follows:
I pledge allegiance to my flag,
anb to the Republic for which it stands,
one nation, indivisible,
with liberty and justice for all.
The words "Under God" were presumptuously added, by an act of Congress, some twenty-three years after Bellamy's death.
Given the usual motivation and quality of Congressional committe authorship[2], it shouldn't be surprising that this seemingly-pious text was added so that Americans could convince themselves that they were "better" than the "godless commies"--never mind that no nation, however misguided its politics, could fail to be under the authority of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent Deity, such as those now screaming loudest claim to embrace.
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HadEnuf
- Which is what eventually happens to Type II diabetics, when the disease goes untreated, but isn't bad enough to kill them.
- Which has, in the last century, generated a code of statute law so blated, complex and self-contradictory that is is worse than useless.
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