Last week, Burbank school district banned five American classics — Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Theodore Taylor’s The Cay and Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry — because four parents complained about them being racist.
Seriously? They had to wait for FOUR parents to complain. In this day and age, it shouldn’t take the entire players of a game of bridge to get books banned. What happened to banning books after just ONE complaint?
We are clearly going backwards here. I mean, To Kill a Mockingbird contains the N-word. We can’t have children learning that language. This should be corrected immediately.
Of course, it may mean they can’t read some of the headlines in Newsweek, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and other right wing racist publications, nor understand what President Obama was talking about. But ignorance is more important than education. Nobody ever claimed that “knowledge is bliss” or “a little bit of ignorance is a dangerous thing.”
Let’s just stick to using “the N-word”, because it’s hard to imagine a child being curious enough to ask what that means.
Where we really want to be is an Orwellian world where history is rewritten according to our new woke standards and there are no misleading fake truths. 1984 hasn’t been banned. However, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was removed from classrooms in Miller, Missouri, for “making promiscuous sex look like fun.”
Talk about misleading information!
We’re also delighted to see that Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter have come to the party to ban anything that contradicts WHO guidelines about COVID-19, such as a banning an anti-mask group that was wrongly claiming that the cheap two-ply masks that everyone wears are ineffective, and citing dozens of academic studies which incorrectly concluded that masks are ineffective.
How are such studies being allowed to draw incorrect conclusions? At least some responsible editors are demanding such papers be retracted, while other leaders in the field refuse to publish such trash, even if it is the largest study of its kind.
But let’s show a little understanding. Everyone makes mistakes, even the CDC, which changed it’s policy on wearing masks in July based on scientific evidence and absolutely not from political lobbying. How strange this is, when the science was already settled during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.
Thank god they changed their tune. I was getting very confused. Let’s get things right and remove anything that departs from the correct line. After all…
Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.
General William Westmoreland
