Watching The Dream

 In 1970, the Mississippi Commission for Educational Television met to discuss the future. A future that would include enormous saffron birds and furiously animated short films about counting to twelve. The Children's Television Workshop was beginning to push the boundaries of the previously only seen on Saturday morning cartoon festivals wedged in between commercials for Cocoa Puffs. The notion that television for children could be programmed for any other reason than to get those children to beg their parents for whatever was being force fed them through the tube was threatening in so many ways. 

Perhaps most notably, this "public television" was being generated out of that liberal fortress known as New York City, and what was coming out was, for many, disturbing. 

Not Ernie sitting in his bathtub singing to his rubber duck. It wasn't even the relationship between Ernie and the pigeon fancier Bert. It wasn't the puppets. It was the kids. 

In 1970, it was a shocking vision to see children of all colors playing and learning together. The commission, appointed by segregationist governor John Bell Williams, stated that Mississippi was "not yet ready" for Sesame Street. "The state has enough problems to face up to without adding to them," an anonymous member of the commission said at the time. 

And public television was doing all of this without commercials. 

Unless you count advocating for early childhood education and the integration of neighborhoods where black, brown and white kids would learn and play with green grouches and blue cookie-addicted monsters. And not once did that cookie monster look up and recommend to viewers that he preferred Chips Ahoy. In fact, for all the big talk, he was as comfortable ingesting capital letters as he was baked goods. 

Mostly it was the kids. Sesame Street had already begun its creep out of those liberal bastions into the flyover states, and it would only be a matter of time even without Al Gore's Internet that this anarchic vision of the future would become commonplace. But there was still resistance. In Shreveport, the local PBS station dropped the show because they "didn't have enough money" to keep it on the air. 

It wasn't the puppets. It was the people. Gordon and Susan and Bob and Mister Hooper and all those kids. All those kids of many colors. All that stuff that Mississippi wasn't ready for in 1970. 

Are they ready for it now?