I'd rather go to those places where local school boards are sat by ignorant locals brought up in ignorant school systems and educate them. If such a debate were happening in my home town, I'd prepare a short lecture (including reading) that pretty much reads like you just wrote. Then, I'd take my allotted time and do my best to educate the ignorant, and enlighten them that sometimes you must struggle through what seems offensive to find that satire and black humor are often used to point out social injustices. Huck Finn is considered a children's book, but it's not really. It is entirely inappropriate for elementary schools, but 7th grade + is a good place for kids to learn that there's ugly things in this world that are worth thinking about.
Very well put, articulate and thought provoking as always.
The struggle for equality is still going on. Didn't a wise man once say, "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."? Beside being classic literature, worth reading just because of that, it's also a historical novel. This is where we came from. If we can read this and realize how far we've come, maybe we can look forward more easily to how much more we have to go.
Good lord people, get a grip. We actually were using the word at that time in history. Censoring historical material (some might call it rewriting history) doesn't make it any less true. Reading it is not going to bring the word back into popular use. In fact, like anything else you forbid, the forbiddance is going to make people want to see why you won't let them read it. You're shooting your own cause by telling people 'no'.
And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman’s robot that hadn’t ever done me no harm, and was showing me there’s One that’s always on the lookout and ain’t a-going to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared... “There was the Sunday school, you could ‘a’ gone to it; and if you’d ‘a’ done it they’d ‘a’ learnt you there that people that acts as I’d been acting about that robot goes to ever-lasting fire.”
It certainly does put a new twist on a beloved classic... but interesting, doesn't really change the story that much!
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The struggle for equality is still going on. Didn't a wise man once say, "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."? Beside being classic literature, worth reading just because of that, it's also a historical novel. This is where we came from. If we can read this and realize how far we've come, maybe we can look forward more easily to how much more we have to go.
Good lord people, get a grip. We actually were using the word at that time in history. Censoring historical material (some might call it rewriting history) doesn't make it any less true. Reading it is not going to bring the word back into popular use. In fact, like anything else you forbid, the forbiddance is going to make people want to see why you won't let them read it. You're shooting your own cause by telling people 'no'.
And I hate censorship.
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It certainly does put a new twist on a beloved classic... but interesting, doesn't really change the story that much!
Trace
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