I promise you, I am really trying hard to keep my promise to you. It gets very difficult, but I am giving it a sincere effort to keep most of our visits on a positive note. However, it seems that just about every day, I'm hit with more and more silliness. The latest bout of goofiness centered around the recent celebration of Dr. Seuss' birthday. I hardly think I need to tell anyone about who Dr. Seuss was. Anyone who has ever had a hunger for that odd culinary dish of Green Eggs and Ham has no doubt heard of Dr. Seuss. He was easily one of the greatest writers of children's literature ever. He had a wonderful talent for using the sounds of words in ways that no other has been able to copy.
For many years, his birthday (March 2) has been designated as “Read Across America day,” a day set aside to remind children of all ages of the joys of reading. I can think of no other day more appropriate to celebrate reading or Dr. Seuss. But, just as some folks have tried to ruin nearly everything else positive; there are those who want to throw a proverbial wet blanket on this day. A school district in Virginia decided to make the ludicrous charge that Dr. Seuss was a racist, and therefore must be erased from the celebration. Anyone who has ever read his clearly anti-racist work entitled “The Sneeches” could not help but come to that conclusion. That is, anyone who has the intellectual capacity of a human of at least three years old. Perhaps that would eliminate those leaders of a certain school district in Virginia.
Perhaps these folks in Virginia know that, in fact, Dr. Seuss was not a racist and they have the urge to flex their muscle and make a claim they know to be false. By making such a claim, they can coerce others to have the very reaction they received. The somewhat frightening part of all this is, the more often these people get the reaction they are seeking, the more often they will attempt to find other “good” things to falsely characterize as “bad.” Pretty soon, they will succeed in having more and more good and wholesome items “canceled” and removed. They force the removal of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, books by Dr. Seuss, the Muppet Show and the list goes on. I wonder how long it will be before these folks get around to “canceling” books like The Bible?
I was encouraged to hear that immediately after Dr. Seuss was “canceled,” the top seven books sales on a certain on-line retailer were books by none other than Theodor Seuss Geisel aka “Dr. Seuss.”