Today, I had a ha! ha! moment. A moment rooted in newly acquired information.
“Banana plants,” says Neil, “are self-fruiting, producing fruits from the female ovaries without the need for male pollen or another plant to help pollinate the flower.” In a word, the banana plant doesn’t require the intimacy of two different sexes to produce its fruit. “Wow!
Instantaneously, my mind swung to my own banana plants and its numerous bunches of bananas. That’s so true, realizing that the banana flowers appear after the birth of the banana and not prior.
Pondering on this freshly acquired information, I linked the banana plant with scores of persons who have devotedly nurtured, not their own biological children, but the children of others. I think of religious priests and sisters, sports coaches, teachers, mentors, men and women managing private and public children’s homes, and parents who formally or informally adopted children. These women and men have responsibly “produced” generations of well-balanced and productive citizens.
Can you remember any of those persons?
But alas! I can’t forget those “banana plants” who have irresponsibly messed up the lives of children in their care. I can’t but think of the children of Canada’s First Nations people who suffered in government-sponsored boarding schools. Evidently, this was a disingenuous plot to use formal education to advance “cultural genocide” – an attempt to wipe out a people’s culture, language and religion with emotionally devastating consequences.
This duplicitous scheme wasn’t unique to Canada. Wasn’t a plot of European colonizers used to varying degrees in Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and South America to establish cultural and political dominance through a system of brainwashing and obliteration of culture?
Beloved Reflections 