The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Lately I’ve been noticing a new drumbeat from the far right, the Red States, the Christian jihad and yellers at PTA meetings across this great land. They want books banned. They don’t want our kids exposed to the woke culture, nothing about sex or sexual preferences, nothing about systemic racism or sexism, nothing that would make them feel uncomfortable knowing certain truths, even the ones self-evident. They would close down the libraries and in some places they’re working on that. They want to shut down the Department of Education. If they could, they’d burn books and maybe even the librarians who dare to allow material these parents object to placed on the shelves.

What I don’t understand is how these people think the real danger to their offspring is in the library. Go ahead, shut down the library, lock the librarians up, burn the objectionable books, that should protect Johnny and Brittany, shouldn’t it? Nearly every kid has a smart phone, nearly every kid has access to the same social media as their folks, nearly every kid can watch violence and porn at the earliest possible age. But hey, the parents think banning a couple of books in their local or school library will buffer their darlings from left wing woke propaganda? The unwoke need to wake the hell up. Their kids’ brains are being groomed all right, but not from some novel about growing up gay in America.

Social media and the internet provide them with creepy bullies, trolls that destroy their developing self-esteem, conspiracy theories, whacked politics, a world of Likes and Unfriending, all guaranteed to warp their childhoods in favor of an immature and puerile adulthood. Parents worry about critical race theory and prefer that to critical thinking. They think their kids, protected from the bogeyman of Hollywood or Disney or Bud Light, will grow up with their values, as if they were Amish and driving the horse and buggy would save them from being assimilated into a decadent culture, the one that surrounds them completely.

Too late, too damn late to ban the books and prosecute the librarians, the Pied Piper of the internet has already stolen their children.

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