From a distance

I remember when I was in elementary school, the music teacher decided we were to sing a song for the parents.  The teacher decided it would be fun to sing a rendition of From A Distance, and she decided that our rendition would be based a recording of the same, performed by an African choir.  A good exercise in cultural exchange, perhaps?  We listened to the recording of their performance over and over again in class (I remember thinking how funny their accents were).


Pretty simple, right?  Well, we got into practicing, and at some point I remember the teacher saying we were to replace certain words in the song.  All the lines that read “God is watching us” were to be replaced with “Love is watching us”.  I didn’t really think it was that big a deal at the time, but I remember my parents were quite upset.  I remember wishing they would calm down, thinking that it wasn’t that big a deal…


Fast forward a decade or so, and I can’t believe they even let me perform in front of an audience.  This is the end result of following Political Correctness…  absurdity.  To sum up:


A good song is butchered into incomprehensibility:  ”Love is watching us” does not make one lick of sense.
Cross-cultural dialogue is rendered moot:  cultural exchange can ostensibly be a good thing.  By changing the entire meaning of the song, much of the potential association with the (largely religious) African continent was lost.


Students are deprived:  whether or not you believe in Him, there is much reasoning that has concluded that God exists.  By replacing the word “God,” the teacher deprived us of exposure to a mainstream way to view reality (isn’t that the mantra of PC-ideologues?), and exposed us to…  well, nothing.


This kind of absurdity is what I hope to expose on this blog…