Have you noticed how much vitriol fills virtually every TV and radio commercial as a prelude to Tuesday’s midterm election? It’s everywhere. And notice how often the name of Bill Richardson, our former U.S. representative and two-term governor, is invoked.

I wonder whether such attack ads make a difference. Quite popular are those that accuse the opponent of having engaged in a secret deal that enriched that person. Otherwise, campaign managers portray the candidate as incompetent.

It must be the seedier part of human nature that makes people believe denigrating someone else elevates the status of the slanderer.

All of that makes me — and I’m sure many others — wonder whether such advertising techniques make any difference. For my part, I feel the urge to vote against any candidate who airs particularly noxious advertisements.

However, when candidates of both parties use the same destructive tactics, it must make many of us wish there were a demonstrable way on each ballot to record a no vote for all of the above.

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It seems that parents go through a period in which their children learn very early to play one against the other.

Kids learn fast. “You always take the side of (fill in),” became common. Clever kids; they knew which buttons to push, and when. My three sons were no exception. Should Mom and Dad deprive all of them of a particular privilege, there was no vocal objection. But if any of the three perceived one of them was being treated favorably, we heard about it.

True, we should treat all offspring the same, but parceling out privileges becomes difficult when there’s a 10-year gap between the oldest and youngest.

But none of this is exclusive to the Trujillo household. Every sibling hoping for preferential, or even fair, treatment doubtless has used the technique.

• • •

Life at Immaculate Conception, the parochial school I attended, seemed like an extension of home life. Some of us felt we weren’t part of the mutual admiration society that others belonged to. I felt periods of resentment in the classrooms of Sister Mary Aggravania and our homeroom teacher, Sister Sin Clemencia.

Any animosity I perceived, I now believe, was due more to the inability of some of us to keep up with the lessons. Some of us struggled with reading, and therefore with most other subjects. I never detected even a hint of favoritism based on social status or ethnicity. In those days, retention of students was a reality and would have delighted Gov. Susana Martinez, who continues to run on that platform: Make ‘em repeat third grade if not up to snuff.

An incident I related in a previous column dealt with the only classroom in the school that lacked individual desks. We shared a slide-across desk too wide for one pupil, too narrow for two. I shared with Robert, who I believed had a congenital facial expression that made him seem to carry a grimace.

“Here she comes!” we all thought as she made her frequent trips between the aisles to slap Robert for “making faces at the teacher.” I believe Robert, a tough kid from a tough Commerce Street neighborhood, grew immune to the slapping.

Once, however, as Sister Sin Clemencia made her way down Slapping Valley, she went down the wrong aisle, coming toward me. “Robert’s not even here today. Why’s she coming this way?” I wondered. But the slap across the face came to me nevertheless.

I believe the hit was indeed intended for my absent seatmate and that once she realized she’d gone that far down the aisle, a delivery was imminent. Of course, at recess, a crowd wanted all the details. “What did you do that made Sister mad, Mannie?” I was asked.

I answered that I had no clue as to the slapping. I uttered a feeble explanation like, “Well Sister didn’t want to waste a trip down the aisle.”

If we fast-forward to present times, we wonder how much times have changed. We read almost daily about teachers suspended or even terminated because they used corporal punishment.
As teachers at Cuba Public Schools in the late ‘60s, several of us used the paddle, and we were backed up by the administration as long as we asked another teacher to witness the paddling.
What would happen today if teachers slapped students for real for imagined face making? But for the record, most of the people I discussed this with, agreed that corporal punishment at I.C. was simply part of the territory. And I don’t believe slappings or whackings with yardsticks damaged our psyches.

After school, the news of my having been slapped “went viral.” My siblings, of course, gleefully reported the news to Mom and Dad and waited anxiously for how they would handle it. But on the way home earlier, a classmate, Paul, appeared quite sympathetic toward my plight. Whereas I believed physical punishment was simply “business as usual,” Paul made a bigger deal of it, arguing that the nun had no right to slap me.

And that gave me an idea: I would play the innocent victim card, which I believed I was. I would explain that Sister One-a-Day was so accustomed to disciplining Robert that she got confused. I would argue that practically all my classmates shed real tears over the attack and that some were on the verge of transferring schools because of it.

I had my fable practically memorized for the grand inquisition at the dinner table, as the entire family, including Tio Juan, lay in wait.

But did any mother of the ‘40s ever fall for self-victimization? I wondered whether my righteous indignation would work.

It didn’t. “If I had been there, I would have given it to you twice as hard,” Mom indicated, to near-applause from my siblings.

The next day at school, I contemplated making a special delivery to Robert, to make sure he got what had been intended for him.

But I didn’t. Besides, Robert was much bigger than I.

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