To Kill a Mockingbird Banned, Again

Yet another school district has banned To Kill a Mockingbird. Because the book makes some people uncomfortable.

Id-E-ots!

The book is supposed to make readers uncomfortable.

The book strikes at racial prejudice and injustice toward Blacks, hitting a bull’s-eye only the mindless can miss.

Like Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird serves as a time capsule, capturing and exposing a period in American history when a majority of people in the South hid behind racial fear and bigotry.

To look at a picture of America today, we live during the period of tearing down markers of history.

“Stupid is as stupid does,” Forrest Gump would say.

Without reminders––art, literature, films, and even monuments to people and historic events––you and I can lose our perspective and sense of indignation that human beings can be so filled with hate.

Protect and Preserve Historical Markers

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, my husband and I traveled to Belarus with a group delivering prescription medicines and pharmacy supplies to hospitals.

And we gave Bibles to people who had not seen a Bible in 70 years. Hugging this book that contains humanity’s history, so many people cried.

Monuments everywhere in Minsk, the capitol of Belarus. Fresh flowers laid on these monuments. Monuments reminded citizens of Belarus what World Wars I and II cost their country. The misery and devastation was incalculable. Ruins remain preserved in places.

Today in America, where the only war fought on American soil was a civil war, civility itself is tested.

We the people want to forget, demonize those once thought of as heroes, ban books and rewrite history.

Defeats the purpose of studying and knowing history. Educational black holes exist where masses of the population know nothing about American history, much less World history.

Ask not what you can tear down, destroy or rewrite. Ask what you can do to preserve the lessons history can teach us all.