Be careful what you keep

I was hauling the Christmas decorations up from the basement the other day when I came across a large plastic crate. In my Mom’s handwriting one word was printed on the front: KEEPSAKES. Basically, it was a large box of awards, photos, papers and accolades accumulated during my youth that my mother saved. My mother could have easily discarded the entire box when I went off to college and I would have never known – or cared, for that matter. But mothers can’t do that. I can almost hear my mother now…
“Greg will probably never need his 5th grade safety patrol pin but you never know.”
So my mother saved the contents and then gave the trunk to me when my parents moved out of THEIR house. And, for some reason, I couldn’t throw the box out either. So it’s remained in the basement, next to the approximately 57 boxes of holiday decorations that my wife has collected and is determined to display for six weeks out of the year. We now have enough Santas, snowmen, candy canes, holly, icicles and lights to decorate not only our house but Bill Gates’ as well. Unpacking Christmas decorations is not a job I relish so it was a no-brainer to take a break and peek inside the keepsakes box. Even though I had peeked before, it was still refreshing to journey down memory lane. Here was my high school varsity letter, earned while playing tennis. Under that was a yellowed newspaper photo of an “invention” I’d created in first grade, consisting of a garden hose sprayer and a single sunglass lens. Still further down, a printing exercise in which I drew the letter “t” over and over on the elementary age writing paper – the kind with three horizontal green lines drawn across the entire page. Not one of my t’s strayed outside the lines, earning a gold star and a “super job” from my kindergarten teacher.
I closed the box and put it back on the shelf, vowing to revisit it in January when I bring the Christmas decorations back to the basement.
And then I heard about the latest hijinx coming from the Hillary Clinton camp.
Somebody from Senator Clinton’s team apparently got hold of a paper that Barack Obama had written in, (are you ready?) kindergarten! A paper titled, “Why I would like to be president.” Because Obama has maintained all along that running for President wasn’t a lifelong ambition, Clinton’s people thought they had caught him in a lie. The paper was PROOF that he’d been angling for the job ever since he was writing on green lined paper!
Clinton’s team of mouthpieces immediately went on the talk shows to claim the comments were made in jest. But it still caused me to look at the contents of my keepsakes box in a different light. What conclusions could people draw from me based on what was inside?
What’s this? An eighth-grade photo of Greg in Oklahoma. Wasn’t that a musical about settlers staking their claims in uncharted territory? Didn’t those settlers push Indians off the land? Greg Schwem must hate Indians!
And what have we here? A photo from Greg’s first Little League team. Look closely. Are there any African Americans on the team? How about Hispanics? Asians? Nope, just white kids. How could Greg associate himself with ANYTHING that lacks racial diversity?
Here’s a crude cutout of a bird that Greg made in third grade art class. Interesting color choice on the feathers. They are all red – the color of BLOOD! The Audubon Society will have a field day with that one.
Where did this swimming ribbon come from? Some quick digging reveals that Greg earned it while swimming for a country club team. Hmmmm, don’t country clubs have exclusionary policies?
And if that wasn’t enough, here is a photo of Greg with some fraternity brothers at Northwestern University. A photo taken during a yearly event known as “wheelchair races,” in which two-man teams race across campus in wheelchairs dressed only in their underwear. Is that Greg in the wheelchair? Greg’s not handicapped, is he? Merely by sitting in it, he is belittling handicapped Americans everywhere. And because Greg is not afflicted in any way, that wheelchair could not have been obtained legally. Greg must have stolen it.
It is a good thing that, unlike Barack Obama, I have never had any aspirations to run for President. Who would want to vote for a racist, animal hating, elitist thief who may have homosexual tendencies?
My daughter is currently in kindergarten. I may have to start home schooling her