There’s a general fear about Christian conservatives, a loud and powerful minority doing a lot of stuff to make rational people afraid for our future in this country.
Seems clear the forces of book censorship, etc., aim at preserving — freezing, actually — their children in their own image. Stepford Children, in effect.
Since I don’t live in Tennessee or Texas, and am surrounded by people who are intelligent, I hear a lot of that fear. And I say, “Remember when we were teenagers? These kids will do what adolescents always do: rebel.”
Today, two articles in the New York Times offered me reassurance.
First, the Times continued their coverage of the uproar a small Tennessee county school board produced when it decided that Maus was inappropriate for its children. The article, “The Fight Over ‘Maus’ Is Part of a Bigger Cultural Battle in Tennessee: State lawmakers, led by the governor, are rethinking what public school students should read and learn,” hands us some reactions from the adults in the room:
Gov. Bill Lee recently announced a partnership with a Christian college to open 50 charter schools designed to educate children to be “informed patriots.”
And…
Tony Allman, a board member, noted that “Maus” described people being hanged and children being killed. “Why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff?” he asked. “It is not wise or healthy.”
Unbelievable, huh? But read on, to learn how the precious children of McMinn County are dealing with this massive effort to save them from reality:
Unprompted, boxes of donated copies of the book flooded the local public library. High school students have rushed to get copies, passing them to one another between classes.
Emma Stratton, a junior at McMinn County High School, drove with her mother and brother an hour away to Chattanooga to buy several copies of the graphic novel. “If they take away this book, what else are they going to take away from us?” Emma asked, adding, “They’re trying to hide history from us.”
Because that’s what we do when we’re kids. We rebel.
On Thursday, the son, Jackson Reffitt, faced his father from the witness stand in Federal District Court in Washington, testifying against him in a remarkable tableau that captured the painful rupture in one family — and in some ways the nation — caused by the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
“He said, ‘If you turn me in, you’re a traitor,’” Jackson Reffitt told the jury as his father watched him intently from across the courtroom and then looked down. “‘And traitors get shot.’”
…
Testifying for more than three hours, Jackson Reffitt, now 19, told the jury how his father had become more distant and severe in his beliefs in 2016, the same year Donald J. Trump was elected president. Father and son, he said, did not see eye-to-eye on politics.
“I was moderately left and my father was moderately right,” the younger Mr. Reffitt said, adding that during that election year, “we both went further in our own direction.”
Because that’s what kids do: they head in their own direction.
Read the whole article. Jackson Reffitt will make you feel much better about the way things are going in the U.S.