News response: Virginia schools ban 'To Kill a Mockingbird', 'Huckleberry Finn' for racial slurs
by: Agent One, Intellegence Hunter-Gatherer
Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print", it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another... - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
MORAL CENSORSHIP
I woke up today and came across more evidence that the world is upside down. I scrolled through the news of the morning and landed on a story about moral censorship in Virgina. All forms of censorship are always used to impose moral values on society. The facts of the story cannot be made up. The story read as if it was the start of a script for a bad morality tale. Origin source of this bad morality tale.
Morality tales are archetypal stories used for entertainment and cultural educational purposes. These stories attempt to tell us the difference between "good" and "evil". The story from Virgina can be analyzed in real time to show how moral censorship is evil regardless of the good intentions of the censors.
FACTS
There is a parent, who has a child, that is a student in the grade ranges of high-school. The student is "bi-racial". This child is the product of two people from different "racial" backgrounds who had sex. In our current times the color of a persons skin is the attribute of racial identity. The story never disclosed the racial backgrounds of the parents.
The student was reading To kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. According to the mother, the student had a difficult time reading certain words in the book. These certain words, known as "racial slurs", effectively paralyzed the students mind from continuing the reading lesson.
The mother of the student didn't want to see her child in such emotional pain. The mother put her battle gear on and went to the school ready to defend her child and other children from the words written in books. She spoke with the proper person who could temporarily "ban" the reading assignments of these particular books. The mother also proposed to form a committee made up of parents and teachers from different cultural backgrounds to protect the minds of the students from certain types of words. She wants to form her very own "Justice League" of Virgina School Censors.
WORD THAT RHYME WITH TRIGGER CAN TRIGGER...
These are the facts of the story I read this morning and they scare the fuck out of me. I have never been able to deal with someone imposing their thoughts and beliefs on me. Historically censorship has been a bad thing for people. Censorship is fundamentally thought control. Censorship is imposed upon a group or the individual by some authority figure. This authority believes they know what is good, right, and acceptable for &qout;all-people" and they also know what is evil, bad, and unacceptable for them too.
All stories of taboos are stories of censorship. All stories of prohibition are stories of censorship. All rules that control the thinking of others are rules created to control a persons thinking. When you have the power to control a persons thinking, you now have the power to control their behavior.
I can not blame the words written in a book for the emotional breakdown of another person. I can only blame the mother for lacking the language to share with her son how words have been used in history.
We read books to have a conversations with the author. The "classically trained mind" was able to function as fully developed beings because they read the great books of western civilization. The methods of how we are presented facts and history influence the framework we have about our present realities. I blame the mother for wanting to close an important part of this conversations of the past with students who will one day be the creators of their future.
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