I’m intrigued by how a woman named Christine Blasey Ford has used the MeToo movement to try and derail Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Court.
She’s gone back in time 30 years and claims when they were at a high school party Brett Kavanaugh, who was 17 years old, and two of his friends got drunk and attacked her.
Kavanaugh and his friends deny they were even at the party in question.
How far should the MeToo movement go back in a person’s life? They are now at the high school level – what’s next? Elementary school? Kindergarten?
This leads me to this frightening memory about my past, and I will start by saying it was Delores’s idea.
Although it was well over 70 years ago, I remember it like it was yesterday. And I swear it was Delores who said it first.
Eddie Forsotti and I were about 5 years old. Delores was an older woman er … girl. She was at least 6 years old.
The three of us were playing in the empty lot a few feet from our houses that I think used to be 2256 West 7th Street, before the fire.
It was a dirt lot that served as a playground for all the kids on West 7th Street.
The older kids – 10 or 11 years old – used it as a place where they could make a fire out of pieces of wood and they would roast inedible potatoes, which were then called “mickeys.”
I heard once that a few of those kids, whose futures were clearly doomed, used the area to smoke cigarettes which they had stolen from their fathers’ packs of Lucky Strike and Old Gold.
On this day, Delores, Eddie and I were in the area alone and that’s when she said it.
“Let’s play ‘Doctor’.”
Now Eddie and I only vaguely knew what playing “Doctor” entailed, but we were aware that like every visit to a real doctor, there was a certain amount of undressing and exploring involved.
We quickly agreed.
Somehow we searched the ground and found all the instruments necessary for a successful game of “Doctor.”
The instruments included a Popsicle stick, little twigs, a shiny rock and the lid from a Dixie ice cream cup with a picture of the Brooklyn Dodgers catcher Mickey Owen on one side.
Delores was the ringleader and treated both Eddie and me as though we were two uneducated interns. She requested that we show her where she decided it was “hurting” us, and then she revealed what we should see that was “hurting” her.
The game broke up quickly when Eddie’s older brother Tommy, who was 10, yelled to us and asked us what were we doing. We jumped apart and rearranged our clothes and scampered home. I’m pretty sure the three of us didn’t feel any guilt. Guilt is something the world and the church instills in you over a longer period of just five years.
That’s my story, and how would I know at the time that playing a little innocent game of “Doctor” when I was 5 would in today’s age of MeToo dominance keep me from ever being appointed to the Supreme Court.
And what if Delores now tells the world, “I’ve thought about that game of ‘Doctor’ every single day for the past 28,670 days. I was ashamed to tell anyone. The truth is Jerry forced me to play ‘Doctor’. He wouldn’t even let me be a doctor in the game. He said I was a girl and all a girl should be was a nurse.”
I have always personally believed that you can’t have too conservative a president nor too liberal a Supreme Court.
So I feel screwed because we are stuck with a Loony Tunes president and I’m certainly not a big fan of his nominee Brett Kavanaugh, but I am a fan of the process of choosing a Supreme Court Justice, and don’t want it changed by rigid political hacks like Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi.
What if they had the MeToo weapon and used it to stop people they believed to be Republican conservatives like Earl Warren, David Souter and Anthony Kennedy, who went on to be great members of the Supreme Court?
Let’s not let a few angry militants and a few shyster politicians take the MeToo movement, which was at first a great thing in stopping monsters from preying on women, and turn it into a weapon that will in time diminish us all.