A Day of Shame

Today, while most of the good folk of the US were busy learning who could win a football game in the rain, I got some indication that I may be a racist.

I was busy in my post-yardwork relaxation when I looked up and saw some sky typing in the air above. I'd already seen some this year, some actual, classic, sky writing, so that wasn't a first, but it took me a minute or so to make out what was being written. Part of that may be due to it being windier than optimal for sky typing so only three or four letters were discernible, but I spent a lot of time trying to figure out which way the letters were arranged.

All I could tell, at first, is that they weren't oriented toward me, and when I figured out that they were upside down, I still couldn't figure out the message.

A moment later and I realized that, for the first time in my life, I was seeing sky typing in Spanish.

I was momentarily thrilled. This is cool, I thought, that the Spanish marketeers were taking advantage of southern California's high, blue skies and I was happy thinking of little Latino kids looking up at the sky I used to as a kid and getting giddy about reading the message. Then, it struck me.

Not only was this the first message en espanol that I'd seen, it had never before dawned on me that sky writing had never before been in anything other than English. I'd never questioned it. Instead, to my chagrin, I'd never given any thought to it and had assumed without question that anything written in the skies would be written for me to understand.

That's not only incredibly selfish, but its as bad as never noticing that Life magazine and CBS showed only the white viewpoint. Some overt racists may rally against Ebony, saying there's no Ivory magazine, all the while never acknowledging or noticing that damn near every magazine on the rack has a white slant, but I'd always considered myself pretty aware.

Until today, that is.

What I'm hoping for next is sky writing or typing in something outside the Latin characters. Cyrillic writing, I think, would look pretty, as would Farsi or Arabic.