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Apr 13, 2023Liked by Susan Campbell

Tangents:

Something I don't understand is how little public discourse there seems to be in response to all this GOP crap about indoctrinating children that says, "You can't help indoctrinating children. As you live with them that happens. We also want to indoctrinate children: just consider toilet training. But why is trying to program children to unquestioning adherence to a singular and puritanical standard superior to bring to provide children with a menu of choices humans have made?"

And at what child age does the parental right to blinker and impoverish their children cease? How obedient to their parents are these library-demolishers? Why, for example, 18 or 21? It's all arbitrary and parents are always parents.

And all these people who have been tutting about the mental health effects on children of the COVID shutdown of schools-- aren't an awful lot of them big on home schooling? Doesn't continuing home schooling concern them? I can easily buy that their true goal is privately run segregation academies for the standardly abled children of the ruling white supremacists, and lack of education for everyone else is just fine, but....

I know that these are the effete logical concerns of someone who doesn't worship raw power and isn't very terrorized by it (due to my demographics and lack of common sense). But I wonder about them, and wish they were being discussed more.

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author

This is a great conversation.

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Apr 13, 2023Liked by Susan Campbell

And don't these maroons know that "forbidden fruit" is much more appealing?

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Apr 13, 2023Liked by Susan Campbell

How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm (After they've seen Paree)?

I guess the answer for some is to burn down Paree

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Apr 13, 2023Liked by Susan Campbell

If anyone thinks this movement is not present in every state, they are dangerously mistaken. And yes, that includes attempts at banning books, display materials, programs, etc. here in Connecticut.

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Even in the blue-est of blue states.

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Apr 13, 2023Liked by Susan Campbell

Heartbreaking.

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It really and truly is.

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Apr 13, 2023Liked by Susan Campbell

My parents did not police my reading. Whatever was in the house was fair game. That is why, at the tender age of 9, I knew the definition of "concubine". I learned it from a book in my mother's reading pile called The Concubine, about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Shortly after, I saw the movie Anne of a Thousand Days (about Henry and Anne) and was fascinated by that period of English history. Around the same time, my mother and I saw Joe Cocker's film, Mad Dogs and Englishman at the US Embassy movie theater. My mother was horrified, and I was bored. That being said, I was in no way negatively affected by any of this. And we won't talk about some of my father's "reading material" that I had access to when they weren't home.

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Ha. I always dug through the house to find dirty reading material, but I suppose my parents hid that stuff in the car.

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My mother wanted to help us to Knowledge of the Great Books but wasn't very well-read.

Her project began and ended with reading us Gulliver's Travels as a bedtime book. She knew that "expurgated" was inferior, so this was not a children's edition. She was peculiarly horrified by anything proximate to human waste. The reading did not last past Gulliver's extinguishing the Lilliputian palace fire.

And then Great Opera, where we had one parentally-abandoned go at Texaco Opera Theatre in which Siegmund and Sieglinda prompted questions about the meaning of "incest." To give my mother credit, she answered. I quite often listened to Texas Opera Theatre later on.

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Apr 13, 2023Liked by Susan Campbell

Fortunately, we have not seen the type of "willy nilly" banning of books here in New Hampshire, but I can promise you that when it happens, the public outcry will be heard everywhere.

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author

Good for you all. I mean that.

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Apr 13, 2023Liked by Susan Campbell

Done.

Thou shalt not be a bystander!

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I love you, Deacon Art.

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Apr 13, 2023Liked by Susan Campbell

I absolutely agree with you on the politics and the regard for libraries.

But what really sang to my heart in your post was that, like me, raised in prurient times in a prurient place, you instantly wanted to read a dirty book. I spent a certain amount of my childhood thinking and hoping that my mother was hiding dirty books (which she called trashymysteries), which I might be able to find and read and learn about these arcane and essential things.

She did hide trashymysteries. When I found them their covers raised great hopes for me, as they typically featured a lot of long stockinged leg on women under streetlights. But they never measured up. Not even on a kid level. Unless you count a sadist in a Charlotte Armstrong mystery who tortured a woman by (I think) squeezing her breast, incurring in her great shame.

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What thinking child WOULDN'T want to read what everyone is calling a dirty book? I mean, honstly...

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Apr 13, 2023Liked by Susan Campbell

That is exactly what I thought before getting to know my son and some of his contemporaries. He has lots of curiosity and always has had, but he doesn't think there are Lurid Secrets Being Kept Away, about the Things That Move The Universe.

It made me realize to what an extent my mother operated o Secrets*, and to what extent that affected my growing-up perspectives. I'm kind of amazed, really, that I raised my son in such sunlight without having Mae that a particular goal.

* No wonder, really. Her father was an unsuccessful con man.

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So she was trained to keep secrets. That happened in my family, where pedophiles were able to commit their crimes for generations because That Was Something You Didn't Talk About.

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Yup

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Also, 12 year old rape victims should marry their rapist or another adult. Cuz, ya’ know, ......

Power running amok.

Then again, church-owned libraries are a thing?

PS: if you are other than, do not go to Florida. You’ve been warned!

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I do go to Florida as we own property there, and I actually tend to find people who aren't buying the whole DeSantistan Canon. I've even been blocked on Twitter by the disappointing state representative because he's a lightweight.

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Oh alrighty then! Let’s hope these folks will have what it takes to put their principles into legislative action. When you are there, where are you? I lived in Orlando 35 plus years. Even in Blue Orange County, social services and programs are Republican inspired and the social policies and the mental health system so broken it hurts more than it helps. Sometimes it seems like beach politics differs from inland politics. Progress in Florida is still, in my humble opinion, so threatened now I’m hoping my daughter will move away for the well-being of my three pubescent grandkids. Maybe had I not been so involved with and invested into the education system and having been traumatized by, yes BY, the mental health crisis that occurred after Scott was elected, my opinion re: Florida living, might be more metered and neutral. But probably not. I try really hard, really hard, to understand how and where things went wrong (although our Mar Twain might call it mass hysteria or the like. But whatever happens next will depend on action not just on what we think might happen if we all try to give the righteous asses their day in the sun. Trouble with me is my New School of Social Research education. G-d bless America 🇺🇸

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I am in Cocoa Beach, not far from you. And I agree that the GOP has a stranglehold on Florida, as they do (for now) in Missouri. I'm all in for changing both of those situations.

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founding
Apr 13, 2023Liked by Susan Campbell

I'll bet Codie (purposely misspelled) has a copy of Mein Kampf right next to his Gideon on his night table?!? The saddest fact here is that he was elected to office so there are many like him in our midst!

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The Democratic party out there cannot seem to get a candidate who can convince the GOP-laden voters to think differently.

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🙏🏾

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