Funny, you don't see those parents helping with field trips, participating in PTA fundraisers, or volunteering in the schools, where they could have a positive effect on their children and find out more about what they're learning. They probably don't even show up for band concerts or lacrosse games. But when there's an opportunity to impose their beliefs on others, they step right up. And I can't help wondering where the current students' grandparents were when schools were being integrated. Someone was throwing those rocks and spitting.
Great going, Lucian! I hope a lot of people kick such ladies off their porch. Maybe you should run for the school board and give them some of the Truscott views.
So far I haven't heard anything like this going on in Sag Harbor, but I will stay tuned and let you know. We have other issues here!
Keep up the good work, in your writing, and in your community, in the world.
My Cats, and my Kids own me for sure. ... I've always thought, babies are born to this world untouched, free of prejudice, malice, or greed beyond a full belly. Would it not be wise to follow?
And if anyone has not heard Sweet Honey in the Rock's glorious setting of Kahlil Gibran's words, here's one version of it: https://youtu.be/ti0rzHq_0xU
Well I beg to disagree. They are my children, regardless if biological, adopted or added to the family in any way. However that does not convey ownership. This is the trick of the message at the doorstep - "Well...." thinks the parent looking at the pamphlet that has been thrust into their hands "of course they are my children. So these people must be just like me...." Subliminal mind control. Practiced by one Dr. Harold Hill in River City -- The Music Man. Our children are supposed to learn and as individuals they are expected to develop as unique, valuable and functional members in society.
Sadly, when the books are all burned and the curriculum is set to a comfortable mid 18th century level, they will become accustomed to remaining silent and accepting their lot.
What are you disagreeing with? Do you not see a difference between "They are my children" and "I own my children"? Note also that Gibran's poem, like the song based on it, do not end with "Your children are not your children." It goes on to show what the poet was getting at.
How utterly incredible (ie. insane) that laws can be passed to strip womens' control over their own bodies, ban books, criminalize speech (don't say gay!), limit gender affirming healthcare, restrict access to voting and regulate on drag queens but NOTHING can be done to limit assault weapon carnage except proposing that even more guns are needed???
The radical right is moving relentlessly and quickly to achieve their goals while Democrats dither and whine about being nonpartisan. Some know how to exercise power and some don't. Biden's administration is looking more and more like a Weimer Republic.
It's exactly that comparison that has me concerned. The MAGAs and other RWNJs don't give a damn about policy unless it's related to some BS culture war identity issue
Patriot Mobile is another company that has a PAC which buys school board seats in elections. They used the parental control BS to win a majority on our school board in Grapevine Colleyville ISD. They pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into our local school board race. It has been nothing but chaos ever since. After many years, Scholastic Book Fairs were not allowed at our schools because they couldn’t vet the books and a book about race or LGBTQ might get in the mix. Our school librarians are leaving…it’sa mess and all under the guise of parental rights.
Yes you are right. Librarians are leaving as well as a lot of good teachers. I have a friend who was a librarian at our local middle school for almost 25 years and she retired at the end of last school year as she could see the handwriting on the wall in regards to books and right wing dogma. We have a troglodyte governor (DeWine) and a corrupt legislature. It is so offensive to me that Republicans are trying to poison our schools whether by book banning or inaction on gun legislation. Once again I look to Paris and Tel Aviv and think that we may need to take to the streets by the millions to speak out about this. We have the strength in numbers. They only have cheating and gerrymandering to use to win.
We need to be alert to wherever these wannabe religious dictators are running for or already in office and organize the heck out of the voters to vote them out. I don't think they'd give a damn about how many people were demonstrating in the streets if they were in office and had the power to impose their draconian agenda.
The Framers enshrined minority rule in the 2nd US Constitution. So, time next you read/hear SCOTUS and/or conservative scholars invoke originalism and textualism keep in mind both words are a euphemism for minority rule, specifically yt-male patriarchal rule.
The Founders and Framers as enlightened my red arse.
I still have a bunch of Scholastic Books! Man, I loved those book fairs and catalogs as a kid, I'd order scads of titles. I was already a voracious reader. I'm cheered to think they're still around promoting books and literacy, but this news makes me depressed.
The destruction the Republicans rump groups and idiots are generating is sickening. Thank you thank you for giving them their material back and asking them to leave. There just have to be enough of us to counter this where we can in some way while we pray for this fever to finally break and disappear. I am entitled to unrealistic wishes I think. Right now. I bet they'll be looking for those next.
I feel sorry for kids in 10th Grade English who won't get to be excited and stimulated by "The Catcher in the Rye" or "To Kill A Mockingbird" like I was.
When I graduated from my university, I looked forward to reading what I wanted to read, not what I had to read. The first book I read was James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
I appreciate you sharing this story. My hope is that others are as sensible as you are. It is scary stuff. Parental rights? It's really about control...a very fascist meme. The concept of ownership is horrifying to me. Your children are your chattel? Really?
I think you're onto something, Marjorie. I hope you'll revive that strip and use it to mock the hell out of the latest know-nothing book banners and the whole noxious tribe of religion dictators who want to drag America back to their fantasy version of the 1950s that would be even worse than the actual 1950s.
1st character: "We threw out all the slavery and LGBTQ books. What else should we ban?"
2nd character: "My kid started reading from a random page in the Bible. There is a LOT of sex in the Bible! Really steamy stuff!"
1st character: "Oh dear! What should we do?"
2nd character: "I looked up online! There's this little outfit in Wichita that puts out clean versions of important books? They have a Bible where they took out ALL the sex! Even the "begats"! We don't want children asking what "begat" means, right?"
1st character: Let's order 1000 copies. We're on the School Board so we can just pay ourselves back..."
And another thing -- I think it's pathetic that these parents and teachers who are so sure that Their Way is the Right Way and the Only Way -- are so terrified of having their hard work undone by a single book or a random glance at a nude statue. (Hiya, David!) Do they secretly think that their belief is so fragile that it will instantly crumble beneath the wrong book, movie, painting, etc.? Where is their faith?
I was taught by a dear lady in the third and fourth grades. She looked like an archetypical old maid elderly schoolmarm, gray hair, wirerimmed glasses, prissy manner -- and she would pin art prints on the walls of the room. "Now, children this is a Picasso and I'm sure you see that it doesn't look like a photograph, but we are all individuals who see things in our individual way and this is how Picasso sees things and I think it is very beautiful..." and then she'd pin up paintings that portrayed actual nudes. "Now children, I know you want to giggle and your parents would be very upset if you tried to draw pictures like this, but remember we were made in God's image and these paintings are celebrating God's work the same way a prayer or a hymn does..."
The Mothers Against Thought were very happy when she retired... I think she goes in the book. Hope she's enjoying dry martinis with the angels...
"The Coneheads" movie isn't exactly haute cinema, but there's a scene early on that I cherish... the two aliens are trapped on earth and forced to get a room in a motel. Jane Curtin (Mother Conehead) is lying in bed, reading the Gideon Bible and cackling with irrepressible laughter.
I was staying in a fancypants resort hotel last week while working at a convention and was dismayed to NOT find a Gideon's Bible in the room! Have those vanished now?
The movie "Executive Action" (a What If? treatment of the JFK assassination, 1973-ish) made great use of those Bibles as a way for conspirators to send coded messages to each other while on the road. I thought that was brilliant -- because they could all rely on a Gideon Bible being wherever they went or stayed. But not attracting attention to itself. Maybe that's not possible today, sob!
Not to mention the blood n guts. I always liked the way Elijah (?), (Elisha?) (one of those prophets), cursed some young'un's for making mock of him by sending some she-bears to tear them limb from limb. Or Samson wacking scores of Philistines with the ass's jawbone. They don't write 'em like that anymore!
Oh. Incidentally, I was rooting through some of my old papers and found some of the preliminary sketches for that long-abandoned project. I had forgotten that I made Jesus Christ a recurring character. I gave him a dog. If anyone needed a dog, it was Jesus Christ.
I used to think it was as simple as "they own you" (which is, at any rate, closer to the truth than YOU owning THEM), but I'm coming to embrace what an Interpersonally Psychoanalytical theorist would describe as a much more complex, reciprocal and ever-shifting relational model.
once upon a time, I could actually carry on conversations using that kind of jargon for HOURS.
in some ways, being old enough to laugh at stuff like that (while still kind of appreciating that it EXISTS) isn't half bad.
but I'd gladly give up a LOT of that stuff in exchange for some feeling in my feet and a functioning knee. I'd give up most of it for a spine that doesn't shrink an inch a year.
sorry for this bitching...it feels like a damp insomniac night awaits and I just feel like mouthing off at random.
when we have to talk about this particularly humiliating burp in American History, we're gonna be embarrassed. I just hope that by then, there'll be enough kids to appreciate its utter depraved stupidity.
that suggestion you think about running for a school board might be as crazy as it sounds right now, although if your point is that such a thing would be unnecessary on the Left Coast, I get that too.
I have an old high school buddy who's been working as a fiery lesbian activist/organizer in Florida for something like thirty years...I should be on HER ass to run for the school board. everybody's on her ass to leave the state, but she says she has lovely friends in a small, but tightly-knit radical community. god knows nobody can afford to move HERE, so she might onto something.
I liked Mr. T.'s close approximation of "Get off my lawn!" And to the children owners in PA. I simply say, "Ha! Florida beat you in the children-owning stakes." In fact, a friend sent a wonderful joke. "It's a good thing you don't have little people down there, else you'd spend all your free time teaching them about slavery and sex."
Get off my lawn 😀. So glad our children are grown. I think at this point in my life, I was born in 68. I am no longer angry with my fellow Americans. I am just disappointed. Anybody else so tired of people that do not want to progress as a society?
By 1968, I was married, and firstborn arrived the following year. I’m not only tired of, but exhausted by people who wish to propel us straight into the 18th C.
Hell, I don't even feel like I own my dog Harley. He's family so I don't refer to myself as his owner. Neither do I say "he's mine" when asked at the dog park. I say "he's with me."
And lord help me if I ever uttered such ownership nonsense in front of my daughter...
it seems to me a beginning of a solution MIGHT lie in more and more "lib'rul"-type parents start to run for school boards at the same rate these scumbags are doing it. yes, it takes time, and yes, most of it is pretty boring and the ones on OUR side don't have all that dark money behind them and well might be in a minority in most places where it COUNTS. but doesn't it seem worth a SHOT?
I would have asked them a little more about exactly WHY they're suddenly so eager to perform this task for which they are so unsuited, but I'm also someone who likes starting arguments with people who ring my doorbell about this kind of horseshit. not that I've ever changed anyone's mind...
Funny, you don't see those parents helping with field trips, participating in PTA fundraisers, or volunteering in the schools, where they could have a positive effect on their children and find out more about what they're learning. They probably don't even show up for band concerts or lacrosse games. But when there's an opportunity to impose their beliefs on others, they step right up. And I can't help wondering where the current students' grandparents were when schools were being integrated. Someone was throwing those rocks and spitting.
Great going, Lucian! I hope a lot of people kick such ladies off their porch. Maybe you should run for the school board and give them some of the Truscott views.
So far I haven't heard anything like this going on in Sag Harbor, but I will stay tuned and let you know. We have other issues here!
Keep up the good work, in your writing, and in your community, in the world.
Your children are not your children.
- Kahlil Gibran
Kahlil Gibran had me at page one. He has a real eye for Truths. I don't even consider my Cat, my Cat.
The cat is not yours. That said the cat OWNS you!
Walter Sassypants agrees with you.
And neither does your cat consider you their owner. This made me laugh out loud. Honestly, I love cats but they are pretty independent little buggers.
My Cats, and my Kids own me for sure. ... I've always thought, babies are born to this world untouched, free of prejudice, malice, or greed beyond a full belly. Would it not be wise to follow?
And if anyone has not heard Sweet Honey in the Rock's glorious setting of Kahlil Gibran's words, here's one version of it: https://youtu.be/ti0rzHq_0xU
Thank you! I love this.
Great rendition...embarrassed to say I've almost forgotten about Sweet Honey in the Rock. Thanks!
Well I beg to disagree. They are my children, regardless if biological, adopted or added to the family in any way. However that does not convey ownership. This is the trick of the message at the doorstep - "Well...." thinks the parent looking at the pamphlet that has been thrust into their hands "of course they are my children. So these people must be just like me...." Subliminal mind control. Practiced by one Dr. Harold Hill in River City -- The Music Man. Our children are supposed to learn and as individuals they are expected to develop as unique, valuable and functional members in society.
Sadly, when the books are all burned and the curriculum is set to a comfortable mid 18th century level, they will become accustomed to remaining silent and accepting their lot.
What are you disagreeing with? Do you not see a difference between "They are my children" and "I own my children"? Note also that Gibran's poem, like the song based on it, do not end with "Your children are not your children." It goes on to show what the poet was getting at.
How utterly incredible (ie. insane) that laws can be passed to strip womens' control over their own bodies, ban books, criminalize speech (don't say gay!), limit gender affirming healthcare, restrict access to voting and regulate on drag queens but NOTHING can be done to limit assault weapon carnage except proposing that even more guns are needed???
"It's a madhouse! A madhouse!"
The radical right is moving relentlessly and quickly to achieve their goals while Democrats dither and whine about being nonpartisan. Some know how to exercise power and some don't. Biden's administration is looking more and more like a Weimer Republic.
It's exactly that comparison that has me concerned. The MAGAs and other RWNJs don't give a damn about policy unless it's related to some BS culture war identity issue
Patriot Mobile is another company that has a PAC which buys school board seats in elections. They used the parental control BS to win a majority on our school board in Grapevine Colleyville ISD. They pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into our local school board race. It has been nothing but chaos ever since. After many years, Scholastic Book Fairs were not allowed at our schools because they couldn’t vet the books and a book about race or LGBTQ might get in the mix. Our school librarians are leaving…it’sa mess and all under the guise of parental rights.
Yes you are right. Librarians are leaving as well as a lot of good teachers. I have a friend who was a librarian at our local middle school for almost 25 years and she retired at the end of last school year as she could see the handwriting on the wall in regards to books and right wing dogma. We have a troglodyte governor (DeWine) and a corrupt legislature. It is so offensive to me that Republicans are trying to poison our schools whether by book banning or inaction on gun legislation. Once again I look to Paris and Tel Aviv and think that we may need to take to the streets by the millions to speak out about this. We have the strength in numbers. They only have cheating and gerrymandering to use to win.
We need to be alert to wherever these wannabe religious dictators are running for or already in office and organize the heck out of the voters to vote them out. I don't think they'd give a damn about how many people were demonstrating in the streets if they were in office and had the power to impose their draconian agenda.
Scholastic Books? Too affordable, so too likely to inspire reading, therefore too dangerous? Minority rule, what a way to run a country!
The Framers enshrined minority rule in the 2nd US Constitution. So, time next you read/hear SCOTUS and/or conservative scholars invoke originalism and textualism keep in mind both words are a euphemism for minority rule, specifically yt-male patriarchal rule.
The Founders and Framers as enlightened my red arse.
I still have a bunch of Scholastic Books! Man, I loved those book fairs and catalogs as a kid, I'd order scads of titles. I was already a voracious reader. I'm cheered to think they're still around promoting books and literacy, but this news makes me depressed.
The destruction the Republicans rump groups and idiots are generating is sickening. Thank you thank you for giving them their material back and asking them to leave. There just have to be enough of us to counter this where we can in some way while we pray for this fever to finally break and disappear. I am entitled to unrealistic wishes I think. Right now. I bet they'll be looking for those next.
I feel sorry for kids in 10th Grade English who won't get to be excited and stimulated by "The Catcher in the Rye" or "To Kill A Mockingbird" like I was.
The book we read in 10th grade was “Silas Marner.” Worst book I ever read. It’s a good thing it didn’t turn me off of reading forever.
Sorry you had to endure that! Hopefully you are an unencumbered reader today!
!
When I graduated from my university, I looked forward to reading what I wanted to read, not what I had to read. The first book I read was James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
A great choice.
And written by George Elliot, a woman. Never read it.
a LOT of people I respect say "Middlemarch" is the best novel they ever read. I wouldn't, but it's pretty damned good.
I also did "Silas Marner," but with an excellent teacher. and under those conditions, it actually got pretty interesting.
I appreciate you sharing this story. My hope is that others are as sensible as you are. It is scary stuff. Parental rights? It's really about control...a very fascist meme. The concept of ownership is horrifying to me. Your children are your chattel? Really?
Here’s what I want to know: If we “own” our children, do we disown them when they turn 18? Or do they disown us?
maybe that's when they start to own US?
For a comic strip I attempted to write (late 70s) I invented a group of fanatic book-phobes I called "Mothers Against Thought."
At the time, I thought I was just being silly. Now it seems I was a prophet.
Argh.
That sounds like winning graphic novel concept. If you write it, I'd certainly read it. Imagine the film.
I think you're onto something, Marjorie. I hope you'll revive that strip and use it to mock the hell out of the latest know-nothing book banners and the whole noxious tribe of religion dictators who want to drag America back to their fantasy version of the 1950s that would be even worse than the actual 1950s.
1st character: "We threw out all the slavery and LGBTQ books. What else should we ban?"
2nd character: "My kid started reading from a random page in the Bible. There is a LOT of sex in the Bible! Really steamy stuff!"
1st character: "Oh dear! What should we do?"
2nd character: "I looked up online! There's this little outfit in Wichita that puts out clean versions of important books? They have a Bible where they took out ALL the sex! Even the "begats"! We don't want children asking what "begat" means, right?"
1st character: Let's order 1000 copies. We're on the School Board so we can just pay ourselves back..."
And another thing -- I think it's pathetic that these parents and teachers who are so sure that Their Way is the Right Way and the Only Way -- are so terrified of having their hard work undone by a single book or a random glance at a nude statue. (Hiya, David!) Do they secretly think that their belief is so fragile that it will instantly crumble beneath the wrong book, movie, painting, etc.? Where is their faith?
I was taught by a dear lady in the third and fourth grades. She looked like an archetypical old maid elderly schoolmarm, gray hair, wirerimmed glasses, prissy manner -- and she would pin art prints on the walls of the room. "Now, children this is a Picasso and I'm sure you see that it doesn't look like a photograph, but we are all individuals who see things in our individual way and this is how Picasso sees things and I think it is very beautiful..." and then she'd pin up paintings that portrayed actual nudes. "Now children, I know you want to giggle and your parents would be very upset if you tried to draw pictures like this, but remember we were made in God's image and these paintings are celebrating God's work the same way a prayer or a hymn does..."
The Mothers Against Thought were very happy when she retired... I think she goes in the book. Hope she's enjoying dry martinis with the angels...
"The Coneheads" movie isn't exactly haute cinema, but there's a scene early on that I cherish... the two aliens are trapped on earth and forced to get a room in a motel. Jane Curtin (Mother Conehead) is lying in bed, reading the Gideon Bible and cackling with irrepressible laughter.
I was staying in a fancypants resort hotel last week while working at a convention and was dismayed to NOT find a Gideon's Bible in the room! Have those vanished now?
The movie "Executive Action" (a What If? treatment of the JFK assassination, 1973-ish) made great use of those Bibles as a way for conspirators to send coded messages to each other while on the road. I thought that was brilliant -- because they could all rely on a Gideon Bible being wherever they went or stayed. But not attracting attention to itself. Maybe that's not possible today, sob!
That's terrible. I always counted on a Gideon Bible being in the room so I could find all the sexy parts of the Old Testament.
Not to mention the blood n guts. I always liked the way Elijah (?), (Elisha?) (one of those prophets), cursed some young'un's for making mock of him by sending some she-bears to tear them limb from limb. Or Samson wacking scores of Philistines with the ass's jawbone. They don't write 'em like that anymore!
Oh. Incidentally, I was rooting through some of my old papers and found some of the preliminary sketches for that long-abandoned project. I had forgotten that I made Jesus Christ a recurring character. I gave him a dog. If anyone needed a dog, it was Jesus Christ.
I keep picturing Davey and Goliath....
The dog probably understood Jesus perfectly so that the Saviour didn't have to resort to parables and hand puppets like he did those thick disciples.
we used to only worry about the Mormons & they were easy by comparison.
"OWN" is a bad bad word. IMHO
Currently some folks are working on OWNING
the Air we breathe along with water, minerals, property and so on. I YEARN TO OWN A SLAVE!!!!!!! like R. Daneel Olivaw.
Americas indeginous folks say,
"one cannot "OWN" the land yet one can live with the land."
Luc, thanks for another succinct post.
your pal, Elijan (Lije) Baley
I won't even allow that I actually "own" my dogs....
I know better than to say I "own" my cats! Cats don't have owners... they have staff.
😹
Again...you don’t. They own you!
I used to think it was as simple as "they own you" (which is, at any rate, closer to the truth than YOU owning THEM), but I'm coming to embrace what an Interpersonally Psychoanalytical theorist would describe as a much more complex, reciprocal and ever-shifting relational model.
once upon a time, I could actually carry on conversations using that kind of jargon for HOURS.
in some ways, being old enough to laugh at stuff like that (while still kind of appreciating that it EXISTS) isn't half bad.
but I'd gladly give up a LOT of that stuff in exchange for some feeling in my feet and a functioning knee. I'd give up most of it for a spine that doesn't shrink an inch a year.
sorry for this bitching...it feels like a damp insomniac night awaits and I just feel like mouthing off at random.
when we have to talk about this particularly humiliating burp in American History, we're gonna be embarrassed. I just hope that by then, there'll be enough kids to appreciate its utter depraved stupidity.
that suggestion you think about running for a school board might be as crazy as it sounds right now, although if your point is that such a thing would be unnecessary on the Left Coast, I get that too.
I have an old high school buddy who's been working as a fiery lesbian activist/organizer in Florida for something like thirty years...I should be on HER ass to run for the school board. everybody's on her ass to leave the state, but she says she has lovely friends in a small, but tightly-knit radical community. god knows nobody can afford to move HERE, so she might onto something.
I liked Mr. T.'s close approximation of "Get off my lawn!" And to the children owners in PA. I simply say, "Ha! Florida beat you in the children-owning stakes." In fact, a friend sent a wonderful joke. "It's a good thing you don't have little people down there, else you'd spend all your free time teaching them about slavery and sex."
Get off my lawn 😀. So glad our children are grown. I think at this point in my life, I was born in 68. I am no longer angry with my fellow Americans. I am just disappointed. Anybody else so tired of people that do not want to progress as a society?
By 1968, I was married, and firstborn arrived the following year. I’m not only tired of, but exhausted by people who wish to propel us straight into the 18th C.
"We own our children."
Hell, I don't even feel like I own my dog Harley. He's family so I don't refer to myself as his owner. Neither do I say "he's mine" when asked at the dog park. I say "he's with me."
And lord help me if I ever uttered such ownership nonsense in front of my daughter...
In a sane world, you could've called
the cops on those vampires
it seems to me a beginning of a solution MIGHT lie in more and more "lib'rul"-type parents start to run for school boards at the same rate these scumbags are doing it. yes, it takes time, and yes, most of it is pretty boring and the ones on OUR side don't have all that dark money behind them and well might be in a minority in most places where it COUNTS. but doesn't it seem worth a SHOT?
I would have asked them a little more about exactly WHY they're suddenly so eager to perform this task for which they are so unsuited, but I'm also someone who likes starting arguments with people who ring my doorbell about this kind of horseshit. not that I've ever changed anyone's mind...
Thanks for trying, anyway.