On groping in general and on Justin Trudeau

It was 1956 and I was in my junior year at Miami Senior High School (aka, MHS) on southwest first street. It was a whites-only school in those days of racial segregation in Florida but most Cubans and other Latinos qualified as white. Only “negroes,” as blacks were then labelled, were disallowed. They had their own segregated negroes-only schools and the twain did not meet even in athletic events. Trudeau grope.

During my 1-hour free period at MHS I was a volunteer “page” in the school library. That meant using the Dewey Decimal System and re-shelving books that had been returned by library users.Trudeau grope.

We had a motto (we male pages): “Why take a whole book to bed when you can have a page?” That was directed to the teen-aged girl pages, if you haven’t already surmised. There may have been some homosexual pages but to be ”a queer” was such a violence-inducing outrage in those days no one would have admitted to it in a mixed group.Trudeau grope.

Those were primitive times.

Nowadays, due to improved birth control and laissez faire sexual morality, the sexual dance is clomped to a whole new tune.

Which leads me to Justin Trudeau and his well-publicized gropee, a fulsome woman journalist who has not brought the subject up and would be most happily served if it were as forgotten as the now-PM would like it to be.

As I understand it, she received a tap on her buttock from a PM-in-the-making some years back, received a half-assed apology and a simultaneous slight in reference Trudeau to the small newspaper for which she was reporting.

A butt tap would have been way too forward in 1956 and we MHS pages would have faced major retribution from the faculty were it to have been reported. And it might well have been reported.

So much of the groping, if you can call it that, was actually accomplished by the girls. They would surreptitiously offer a press of breast against the back of a boy’s arm when walking up to him. They were clever and salacious in an easily-denied manner.

The baby PM, it seems was more cavalier in his grope. He reportedly told the owner of the violated buttock, “If I had known you were reporting for a national paper, I never would have been so forward.” She was reporting for the Creston Valley Advance, so it was a snide putdown of her diminutive magnitude as a journalist.

The reporter herself didn’t bring back the reference to that long-gone butt grope.

But who knew then it would come back now to bite the PM on his own butt?

Pierre’s silly boy is that PM. Sadly, many might think, he’s our PM.

— Frank Touby