I feel for Adrian Raeside and the Times Colonist staff for the predictable backlash to Wednesday’s cartoon.
It brought back memories of the episode from Sudan in 2007 when that poor English teacher, Gillian Gibbons, nearly lost her head because a class of six-year-olds named their teddy bear Muhammad. She’s now known as the Teddy Bear Teacher.
Clinical psychologists and English teachers are probably having a field day over this, ranging from projections à la the Thematic Apperception Test to the meaning of cartoons representing societal perceptions.
People of varying personality structures project what their inner psyches see in loosely structured people-based scenarios. Some of us are born left-handed, some right-handed; some of us have blue eyes, others brown. Some of us see bias, prejudice and become outright hostile; others see classy rhetoric in pictures.
For those seriously offended, may I suggest an hour or two with Viktor Frankl, concentration camp survivor, and his Man’s Search for Meaning, which deals heavily on the meaning of life.
Donald Lang
Victoria
