How I accidentally talked about race and wasted a lot of time. Or did I?

Meet the plastic family. They’ve recently purchased this house in a decent neighborhood. We think they’ve had a good run and retired early. While he picked up flying as a hobby, she soon grew bored after the house was decorated and the animals came. After standing the pet test, the plastic family were ready for kids. They used to be actors, so they adopted a whole bunch of them. With the kids came the Grandparents and the Nanny and there’s the extended family, friends and neighbors.

Daddy still enjoys flying and goes out of his way to make the Nanny feel welcome. Just recently, he took her to a weekend getaway. Mum likes to sit down and chat (apparently, that’s all mummies like to do) with her brother and his boyfriend. Señor Dingdong fixes that damn doorbell a lot, Sir Lurksalot seems always around for a chat and Grandpa and Uncle Chatter are highly gifted babysitters. Sometimes they take the kids camping. Grandpa also likes to blog and is trying to figure out what happened to Grandma.

I wonder if Uncle Chatter has a crush on the nanny but once the kids are asleep, there are all sorts of things going on in the doll house I shouldn’t think about, but I digress. Playing with the twins one day, I mentioned to Little One that they looked just like her friend Lisa. She gave me this completely puzzled look and I felt as if I was wasting her time. She returned to playing and simply refused to talk to me about something so utterly unimportant. Life in the doll house is colorful. There is no Ageism, Homophobia, Racism or Serenophobia (the fear of mermaids. Not even Gingerism or Gingerphobia, which are words according to Urban Dictionary and Wikipedia.)

Life for kids is colorful. The best friends at childcare are an Indian girl and a little redhead and our friends come from all sorts of places. Little One discriminates against a whole bunch of vegetables but that’s about it. Young children learn about sharing, the environment and pollution, being kind to animals and being honest, to grow up into a world where white lies are normal, our dying planet doesn’t seem to bother many and everything depends on money. Real life is not much like in the picture books. Can there be peace as long as people say, “I have no problem with foreigners BUT …”? If children are our future, maybe we need to protect them from ourselves. We need to do the ground work and teach our kids about tolerance and diversity. Equipped with some values, maybe the new generation will be able to grow up as open-minded citizens of the world.