Watching Duck Dynasty:More Things I Haven’t Done Yet. . . .
Mamacita says: Watching Duck Dynasty might be number one, but there are still a lot of things I haven’t done. I didn’t realize how many things I’ve never done compared to the number of things I HAVE done. Then again, that’s a ridiculous comparison. Nobody does more things than they don’t do.
1. I have never watched Duck Dynasty. I find those people repulsive 
in almost every possible way. Rich society golf-playing men pretending to be rednecks to lure in a redneck viewership stupid enough to fall for their idiocy. It’s an act, like any show, but it represents a lifestyle I find repellent. I know most people watch it to laugh at it, but it’s too awful to laugh at because I know there are actual people who think this is a viable lifestyle.
2. I have never learned to be patient with people who are in line and are absolutely unprepared. People at the post office who bring bags of things and pack them at the counter, constantly asking for tape and markers, or who buy stamps at the counter and stand there putting them on each envelope. People at the grocery store who wait until everything is bagged before even opening a purse or wallet. I think the reason I have no patience with these people is that they deserve no patience.
3. I will never have either patience or liking for people who go through a fast food drive-through during meal-time rush hour with 
special orders. I can feel the venom course through my veins. Drive-through lines are for fast, simple orders – otherwise, it’s SLOW food, which nice people go inside to order. If going inside is too difficult for you, wait until rush hour is over and THEN go through the drive-through. If you can’t wait that long, go home and fix something.
4. I have never learned to like sauerkraut. It’s too much like a big wad of dormitory shower drain hair.
5. I always assume that people who lay the cologne on so thickly they’re giving off fumes are trying to mask other odors too personal and horrific to mention. I haven’t yet learned how to NOT look repulsed, and it’s more because of my imagination than how they actually smell.
6. I have never learned to like peas, and I like them even less with potatoes mixed into them. Even as a child, I picked the peas out of my soup.
7. Casseroles are not my thing, unless I know for sure they don’t contain kraut, onions, or peas.
8. I have never been a breakfast person, even as a child. I like breakfast food sometimes, but only really late at night. The very thought of eating anything early in the morning is horrible.
9. I have never and will never be able to endure people who yell a lot. Yelling scares me. Yelling people scare me. Yelling people terrify me, in fact. When I’m with people who yell, I sit in suspense, waiting for it. It’s like sitting with a lit fuse, and you’re not sure exactly when it’s going to explode; you only know that it’s going to and that it’s going to be awful.
10. I will never learn to understand people for whom constant, never-ending learning is not a vital part of their lives. Then again, that’s who Duck Dynasty was made for.
Sometimes I suspect that I’ve got a good-sized mean streak. Other times I’m sure of it.
What’s that? You’ve got one, too? Come sit right here by me.
No Shit, Sherlock: The Case of the Cultural Literacy Conundrum
Mamacita says: Sometimes, teachers assume that their students have a background in cultural literacy when in fact they do not. And sometimes, helping a student make and understand a connection between one thing and another, makes it all worthwhile. Sometimes, teachers do not agree on what is worthwhile and what is not.
A few years ago, my sixth graders were getting ready to read a Sherlock Holmes short story: The Adventure of the Speckled Band, to be specific, which is my favorite Sherlock Holmes story.
About ten seconds into my enthusiastic introduction to the story, I realized that my students had never in all their lives even HEARD of Sherlock Holmes. They will never be able to make that claim again, however. I assure you.
Every night, the snake climbed down the rope and crawled around on Julia’s bed.
Dr. Roylott’s scheme to have the snake kill his stepdaughter backfired. . . .
We read the story and most of the students agreed that it was pretty cool. Snakes. Poisonous snakes. Big ones. Gypsies camping in the yard. A cheetah and a baboon wandering free. A huge powerful man given to fits of violence. A bed, nailed to the floor. Bending the iron rod. Holmes, bending it back. We discussed the physics of the iron rod; all the students, young as they were, knew that bending the rod in the first place required strength, and that bending it BACK required even more. Holmes’ powers of observation fascinated the kids. Weird noises in the night. Strange coincidences that even an 11-year-old thought off-kilter. A bell-pull that pulled no bell. Shared inheritances. Screams in the night. What’s not to love? Before they left my room, I recommended other Holmes stories, and the bell rang, and they left my room. I sat there hoping the unit had gone as well for THEM as it did for me.
I knew it had been a good unit when I overheard a group of boys talking about it in the hallway.
“Now I know what it really means when somebody says ‘No shit, Sherlock!'”
No, I did not stop short, drag the student to the office and demand that he be punished for saying ‘shit.’ The P.E. teacher who also overheard the boys wanted to, but I asserted myself, which didn’t often happen because I am pretty much of a wuss in spite of my big talkin’ ways, and anyway, I do not believe in jumping on kids when their conversation was not directed towards me. Eavesdroppers often hear negative things, and if they would mind their own business, it wouldn’t be such a big deal. (I am not referring to inappropriate remarks specifically aimed at a non-invited listener with the intent of upsetting, insulting, or otherwise involving said uninvited listener, mind you; I am talking about private conversations that happen to be overheard and sometimes taken personally when no personal involvement is intended.)
Holmes driving the snake back up the rope and into the next room….
I figured that we were eavesdropping on those boys, and that whatever they said to each other in their supposed privacy (unless it was about bombs or threats or clues about who TP’d the restroom or whispers of abuse, etc.) was their business, not ours. Kids deserve some respect.
The other teacher walked off in a huff, carefully, so the corncob wouldn’t fall out. I smiled at the boys and said, “That’s right, guys.”
Knowledge is power. Education is all about connections. And that, as far as I was concerned, was a legitimate connection.
Too many people take too many things far too seriously these days. It takes our attention away from REALLY serious things, and THAT, my dear readers, is why so many important things are circling the drain while others, not nearly as important or serious, are getting so much attention.
Taking offense at someone else’s private conversation? Please.
Let’s all try to use our brains a little more, and our sense of context a little more, and our “I’m offended” a little less. There are too many genuinely important issues out there; we must not allow ourselves to be influenced by, let alone offended by, an overheard conversation not even intended for the eavesdropper’s ear.
I do not want to live to see the Kardashians win.
Were these eleven-year-old boys having an inappropriate conversation? I don’t think they were. I think they were having quite the intellectual discussion, truth be told.
Was the PE teacher overreacting in her zeal to have the boys rounded up, branded, and sent out to the North Forty to do penance?
No shit, Sherlock.
Censorship is for Chumps
Mamacita says: If I owned the biggest and best thesaurus in the universe, I still would not be able to find a word accurate enough to fully express my disgust and loathing of book banning and censorship, nor of the mentality of those who censor. Let’s not tiptoe around this issue – it’s too important. It must be grabbed the balls neck and squeezed tightly enough to elicit a scream. Or perhaps a squeamish, ladylike squeal, from those who advocate censorship.
It’s one thing for fearful people to dictate to their own children and each other what may and may not be read within their own home, but when such people take it upon themselves to dictate to others what the children of others may and may not read, there we have a problem.
A big problem. A really, really big problem.
Because if you dare step into my house and start telling me what we may and may not read or watch or eat or wear or anything else imagined or not imagined, you are in territory you have no right to be in.
Keep your narrow, pathetic, frightened, scripted, dictated-by-others beliefs where they belong: in your own home and nowhere else.
NOWHERE ELSE.
Oh, and I am so terribly sorry for your children. With a little luck, I hope they can manage to grow up with brains intact, unblemished by your sad belief system and frightened, suspicious, narrow existence.
Harsh? Hah. I haven’t even let myself start with you.
1. We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still. — John Stuart Mill
2. The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen. — Tommy Smothers
3. The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book. — Walt Whitman 
4. Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too. — Voltaire
5. I am thankful for all the complaining I hear about our government because it means we have freedom of speech. — Nancie J. Carmody
6. Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. — Alfred Whitney Griswold
7. Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings. — Heinrich Heine
8. Every burned book enlightens the world. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
9. Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself. — Dick Cavett
10. To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor’s prohibited list. — John Aikin
11. God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide — Rebecca West
12. If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. — Noam Chomsky
13. I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. — Voltaire
14. If your library is not ‘unsafe’, it probably isn’t doing its job. — John Berry
15. Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission. — Arnold Bennett
16. There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. –Joseph Alexandrovitch Brodsky
17. Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion. — David Cronenberg
18. Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage. –Winston Churchill
19. You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken – unspeakable! – fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse – a little tiny mouse! -of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. –Winston Churchill
20. If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas – and I believe that is the truest definition of what we do – it is crucial to remember that we must keep and make available, not just good ideas and noble ideas, but bad ideas, silly ideas, and yes, even dangerous or wicked ideas. –Graceanne A. Decandido
21. To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves. –Claude Adrien Helvetius, De l’Homme
22. Fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the loftiest form of cowardice.
–Holbrook Jackson
23. Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble. –Peter S. Jennison
24. Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance.
–Lyndon Baines Johnson
25. The burning of an author’s books, imprisonment for an opinion’s sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time. –Joseph Lewis
26. Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there.
–Clare Booth Luce
27. To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it. –Michel de Montaigne
28. Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always be the last resort of the boob and the bigot. –Eugene Gladstone O’Neill
29. All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship. –George Bernard Shaw
30. Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it. — Kurt Vonnegut
31. An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. –Oscar Wilde
32. Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice. — Henry Louis Gates
33. Everyone has an opinion, and the guy screaming for censorship may be the next guy to have his ideas cut off. — Richard King
34. Pontius Pilate was the first great censor and Jesus Christ the first great victim of censorship. — Ben Lindsey
35. The only thing that is obscene is censorship. — Craig Bruce
36. If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all—except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty. — John Fitzgerald Kennedy
37. We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder “censorship,” we call it “concern for commercial viability.” — David Mamet
38. Censorship: the reaction of the ignorant to freedom. — Unknown
39. He is always the severest censor of the merit of others who has the least worth of his own — Elias Lyman Maggon
40. Even to the present day, we so often condemn books that were written to fight the very things we claim to be fighting. Mark Twain’s (Samuel Clemens’) Huckleberry Finn is so often cited as being racist, when it was written against slavery and racism. — -Jamey Fletcher
41. The most common examples of book censorship are in schools and public libraries, and all those examples are most often involving children’s literature. Political groups attempt to remove books from library shelves because those books use ‘naughty’ words, do not have happy endings… or because they have too many rainbows. Rainbows are considered a sign of ‘New Age’ religiosity. Little Red Riding Hood was the 24th most banned book in the early 90’s mostly because she had a bottle of wine in her basket. Many organizations demanded a non-alcohol Little Red. They were successful sometimes in their efforts, by the way. –Herbert Foerstel
42. There is nothing more frightening than active ignorance. –Goethe
43. One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present. –Golda Meir
44. The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventhday Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme. –Ray Bradbury
45. I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them. Censors only read a book with great difficulty, moving their lips as they puzzle out each syllable, when someone tells them that the book is unfit to read.
–Robertson Davies
46. It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies. –William O. Douglas
47. Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory. –Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
48. We trust Americans to recognize propaganda and misinformation, and to make their own decisions about what they read and believe. — American Library Association
49. The use of “religion” as an excuse to repress the freedom of expression and to deny human rights is not confined to any country or time. — Margaret Atwood
50. As to the evil which results from censorship, it is impossible to measure it, because it is impossible to tell where it ends. –Jeremy Bentham
51. Purveyors of political correctness will, in the final analysis, not even allow others their judgments… They celebrate “difference,” but they will not allow people truly to be different — to think differently, and to say what they think. –Mark Berley
52. In order to get the truth, conflicting arguments and expression must be allowed. There can be no freedom without choice, no sound choice without knowledge. — David K. Berninghausen
53. The censor believes that he can hold back the mighty traffic of life with a tin whistle and a raised right hand. For after all, it is life with which he quarrels. –Heywood Broun
54. We are not the keeper of our brother’s morals – only of his rights. –Judith Crist
55. To prevent inquiry is among the worst of evils. –Thomas Holcroft
56. The First Amendment says nothing about a right not to be offended. The risk of finding someone else’s speech offensive is the price each of us pays for our own free speech. Free people don’t run to court — or to the principal — when they encounter a message they don’t like. They answer it with one of their own. –Jeff Jacoby
57. Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. –Doris Lessing
58. If none of us ever read a book that was “dangerous,” had a friend who was “different,” or joined an organization that advocated “change,” we would all be the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants. — Edward R. Murrow
59. Obviously, the danger is not in the actual act of reading itself, but rather, the possibility that the texts children read will incite questions, introduce novel ideas, and provoke critical inquiry. –Persis M. Karim
60. Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won’t have as much censorship because we won’t have as much fear. — Judy Blume
61. If you don’t want your child to read a particular book, that’s your choice. But please don’t attempt to dictate such choices for the rest of us. — E.R. Frank
62. No one should have the power to decide what other people’s kids may or may not read. – Lisa McMann
As Inigo Montoya would say, “Let me sum up.” Here it is.
Censorship is for chumps. Smart people won’t tolerate it.
