The Wife and I spent a quiet couple of days in Provincetown last weekend. Largely uneventful — pleasant weather, long walks and bike rides, overindulgence in Portuguese fried doughs and Gruyere cheeses — but I should say I came home with an
issue stuck in my craw.
Allow me to set the scene: a reasonably bright Saturday morning by the seaside. The Wife and I ambling down Commercial Street, past the cafes, the cabarets, the hundred B & B's, the epigrammatic T-shirt shops. Then, suddenly, it crops up on the right: a signpost, all but leaping off its moorings and into the street to tell me that there are "SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY." As if that was something I, or anybody else, needed to know — or that these poor little ones need to be told every time they leave the house.
Really! To think that you would see a SLOW CHILDREN sign here, in Provincetown, Massachusetts — America's supposed bastion of tolerance! The bad feeling, the smugness, the discriminatory animus emanating from this sign took some time for me to shake. In fact, it very nearly ruined my lunch.
So Susie can't master her multiplication tables. Or Billy can't get the feel of writing in script. Maybe Little Fred jest plumb don't go in for book lurnin', and that-there kickball don't come off his foot right. So the townspeople can go and stick signs in their front yards to ridicule them, just because they're not like "reg'lar folks?" Didn't anybody read
To Kill a Mockingbird? Boo Radley was a
good guy — and I daresay a
hero for saving Scout like he did — he was just
misunderstood.
These kids have a hard enough time in life, facing regular abuse from their more up-to-snuff peers, living near heavily-trafficked thruways as they tend to do. You would think that here in the 21st century society could get past stigmatizing SLOW CHILDREN, but the beat goes on. Even in P-town, apparently.
