Diana’s Little Corner in the Nutmeg State: Bored, Bored, Bored

Monday, October 12, 2026

Bored, Bored, Bored

I surfed the channels, nothing but football and sitcoms. I try PBS... nope, nope, nop... wait a minute! Trans?

A New PBS Documentary Offers a Gentle Message to Our Polarized Times. I Hated It.
Bucks County, USA examines our political divisions and finds very fine people on both sides.
Slate
By Sam Adams
Sept 21, 2026

Philadelphia’s collar counties are some of the most sought-after real estate in American politics, the swingingest part of a critical swing state. And Bucks County, which sprawls northward along the New Jersey border, is the most evenly divided of them all. In 2024, the county cast more than 400,000 votes for president; Donald Trump won by fewer than 300. So it was a shock even to some locals when the Bucks County school board took a massive turn to the right in 2021, with a newly radicalized Republican majority pulling books from school libraries and banning pride flags and other symbols of support from the classroom. It must have seemed like the perfect spot for Barry Levinson and Robert May to set a five-episode docuseries on the political polarization of America, centered on the friendship between two high school girls whose parents hold vastly different political views.

[...]

Where Levinson and May get into trouble is in treating those epithets as equivalent, as if bigot and transphobe were merely unkind insults, out of bounds no matter how extreme the views of the people they’re describing. Donte King, the Black father of a young daughter, recalls the pain that flooded into his face when his daughter innocently repeated a racist joke she’d heard from a classmate, and Lily Freeman, a trans high school senior, relates the physical and mental abuse she’s suffered at school. But like the deaths that prompted the COVID closures in the first place, their injuries are minimized or simply denied by enraged conservatives who’ve only just cottoned on to what their kids are learning in school.

It is on Passport, so I'll be watching the show and I'll let you know what I think of it.

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Quotes

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.

A right delayed is a right denied.Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.

Martin Luther King Jr.

No one is born hating another person… People must learn to hate and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.
Nelson Mandela

We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist
James Baldwin

There is a fine line between free speech and hate speech. Free speech encourages debate whereas hate speech incites violence.
Newton Lee

The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.
Albert Einstein

“A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right, and evil doesn't become good, just because it's accepted by a majority.”
― Booker T. Washington

"We will not walk in fear one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason."
– Edward R. Murrow

"The point is that there are always obstacles, whether they seem insurmountable or merely bothersome. The question is not how difficult the path, but whether in your heart, you wish to undertake the journey."
Zandru's Forge

Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words. Keep your words positive because your words become your behavior. Keep your behavior positive because your behavior becomes your habits. Keep your habits positive because your habits become your values. Keep your values positive because your values become your destiny.
Mahatma Gandhi

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

You've Got To Be Carefully Taught
You've got to be taught
To hate
And fear
You've got to be taught
From year
To year
Its got to
Be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to
Be carefully
Taught
You've got to be taught
To be
Afraid
Of people
Who's eyes are oddly made
And people who's skin is a different shade

South Pacific
Songwriters: Oscar Hammerstein II / Richard Rogers

Monday, October 12, 2026

Bored, Bored, Bored

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