Occasionally, I find myself feeling like a modern-day Rip Van Winkle. It sometimes seems as if, overnight, while I've been snoozing, the rest of the world has glommed onto something like a pitbull with a lamb chop.

For instance, take the word "Oriental." I had always used that word to mean people and things whose origin was the Far East.. And while I used it to denote people whose skin was yellow, I never regarded it as a pejorative. The fact is, I never heard anybody use the word in a derogatory fashion.

That is not to suggest that I was unaware of all the hatred directed at Orientals. Going back to the days of the coolies who laid railroad tracks across this country, they have had to deal with open hostility. And things certainly didn't improve once we waged war in short order against Japan and North Korea. However, bigots never referred to the enemy as Orientals. Instead, their vulgar vocabulary consisted of Jap, slope, slant, Nip, Chink, and gook.

In my experience, nobody ever said "Oriental" and meant anything bad by it. In fact, when coupled with rugs, painting and cuisine, it invariably indicated something terrific. But, one day, I awoke and discovered that the PC police had decided that we were all supposed to lump yellow people and brown people together and call the end-result Asians.

A year or so ago, I asked a friend, a Nisei, just when the word had come to have a negative connotation. He admitted that he had no idea. Moreover, neither he nor anyone he knew had ever regarded it as an insult.

Yet another example of something that the rest of you seem to have decided while I was busy napping is that the reason minority kids are doomed to failure is because they're raised in slums and ghettos.

I have a major problem with that notion. For well over a hundred years, immigrants from Germany, Russia, Poland, Greece, Hungary, Italy, China, Scandinavia, etc., flooded into America--most of them poor, uneducated, unable to speak English--but it was a given that they, and especially their children, would be motivated by their circumstances to achieve success through education and hard work.

But, somewhere along the way, no doubt while I was catching forty winks, liberals turned that notion on its head. Today, when so many minority youngsters turn to drugs, gangs and teenage promiscuity, the reason for it, according to Hillary Clinton and the New York Times, is invariably that old standby, poverty.

The problem is that it only seems to have that detrimental effect on blacks and Hispanics. For every other group, oddly enough, poverty appears to be as large a stick as it ever was, and the American dream remains the biggest carrot mankind has ever known.

Burt Prelutsky

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©2004 Burt Prelutsky

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