Barbara Kingsolver is a genius. It just so happens I am too.

In my final undergrad class, Women's Memoir with Dr. Pringle, the final book we're assigned is Barbara Kingsolver's High Tide in Tucson. It's broken up into essays as opposed to chapters, which I love.


As I skipped ahead on the syllabus and started this book, as opposed to finishing the dreadfully boring Patricia Hampl book, I have fallen mildly in love (sorry Nick).


In her essay "How Mr. Dewey Decimal Saved My Life," she writes:

 ...now that I am a parent myself, I'm sympathetic to the longing for some control over what children read, or watch, or do. Our protectiveness is a deeply loving and deeply misguided effort to keep our kids inside the bounds of what we know is safe and right. Sure, I want to train my child to goodness. But unless I can invoke amnesia to blot out my own past, I have to see it's impossible to keep her inside the world I came up in.

Right- this I understand completely. Although she is a little older than I am, so the world I came up in was already starting to become dangerous for children.


She continues:

Now, with my adolescence behind me and my daughter's still ahead, I am nearly speechless with gratitude for the endurance and goodwill of librarians in an era that discourages reading in almost incomprehensible ways. WE'VE CREATED FOR OURSELVES A CULTURE THAT UNDERVALUES EDUCATION [emphasis mine] (compared with the res of the industrialized world, to say the least), undervalues the breadth of experience (compared with our potential), downright discourages critical thinking (judging from what the majority of us watch and read), and distrusts foreign ideas.

Most alarming, to my mind, is that we the people tolerate censorship in school libraries for the most bizarre and frivolous of reasons. Art books that contain (horrors!) nude human beings, and The Wizard of Oz because it has witches in it. Not always, everywhere, but everywhere, always something. And censorship of certain ideas in some quarters is enough to sway curriculum's at the national level. Sometimes profoundly. 

The parents who believe in Special Creation have every right to tell their children how the world was made all at once, of a piece, in the year 4,004 B.C. Heaven knows, I tell my daughter things about economic justice that are just about as far outside the mainstream of American dogma. But I don't expect her school to forgo teaching Western history or capitalist economics on my account. Likewise, it should be the JOB OF THE SPECIAL CREATIONIST PARENTS TO MAKE THEIR STORY CONVINCING TO THEIR CHILDREN, SET AGAINST THE SCHOOL'S BRIGHT SCENERY OF DINOSAUR FOSSILS AND GENETIC PUZZLE-SOLVING, THE CRYSTAL CLARITY OF DARWINIAN LOGIC, THE WHOLE GLORIOUS SCIENCE OF AN EVOLVING WORLD THAT TELLS ITS OWN CREATION STORY. IT CANNOT BE ANY TEACHER'S DUTY TO TIPTOE AROUND RELIGION, HIDING OBJECTS THAT MIGHT RAISE QUESTIONS AT HOME [emphasis mine, again].

If there is a fatal notion on this earth, it's the notion that wider horizons will be fatal. Difficult, troublesome, scary - yes, all that. But the wounds, for a sturdy child, will not be mortal.

Mind = Blown people. This book was published in 1995.  Seventeen years ago this woman was already feeling the same way I feel now. I wonder what her opinion is now, given how worse things have gotten.


Why should "we" have to suffer because a small group of people think that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, The Giver, Harry Potter (series), and James and the Giant Peach should be unteachable, and unobtainable to our children? The national banned book list is ridiculously long, and there are so many books on it that are as equally ridiculous! I couldn't believe it when I looked it up. 


And what's the deal with our education system? It's ok for the government officials to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year while the education system gets bastardized and shit on every year? Somehow I don't think the founding fathers would be happy. I know I'm not. The problem is that we've passed the era where people protest and hold the government accountable. Everyone today is content to bitch about it all, but unwilling to do anything about it. I don't understand why we, the voters, and the people who are affected by all of this are content with sitting idly by while the jokers in Washington rake it in and laugh-it-up. 

  Come on people. Get your head out of your asses. Once we lose the education system, there's no coming back.

Minecraft, YouTube and a not-so-sneaky 10yr old

So last night my son tells me he can't sleep in his room because his lightbulb is out. Obviously anyone that's seen me knows I'm not going to change it, even on a chair I'm still too short. Nick is in Key West and so I told Mason he could sleep on the couch upstairs in the living room.

His new thing - because God knows he won't pick up a book to save his life - is watching Minecraft videos on YouTube. For those of us not schooled in video games and other geekery, it's a weird video game where everything looks square and pixelated. 

I sent him to "bed' at 9:30, told him to brush his teeth and we went to sleep. Or so I thought. Around midnight something woke me up, probably Claire because she came tearing out of her room fussing like she does, all freaked out in the middle of me chewing Mason out. He got back onto the computer (his special profile with child protection security) and was still up! When he heard me stomping out to the living room he jumped up and almost fell in his haste to try to scramble back to the couch before I saw him. UGH! 

The joys of parenting. If he's this fun at 10, I can't wait until he's 15.