I’ve been silent here for way too many months.  Not because I haven’t been thinking and writing.  I have.  But, I haven’t been sharing.

Why?

Because my parents taught me that if you can’t say something nice, you shouldn’t say anything at all.  And I have nothing nice to say about much that is going in my state, the United States, or the world.  Things are broken.  People are broken.  Governments are broken.  The natural world is broken.  All of this makes me incredibly sad.  We should all do better, be better.

The words, “if you aren’t part of the solution then you are part of the problem” now create an almost constant ostinato in my head.  My silence makes me part of the problem; it assumes I am okay with the way things are.  I’m not.  So, I’m going to write.  If what I share causes only one person to stop and think or perhaps even think differently, then that counts as movement…hopefully movement toward a solution.

So, here goes…

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One sunny Saturday afternoon back in 1991, my husband, our then 2 year-old daughter, and I were in the car heading down the busy interstate through Dallas when the little voice from the backseat exclaims, “Mama!  I see a horse!”  Admittedly, one expects to see horses in Texas, just not on the interstae in the middle of the city.  I thought she was looking at a book.  Nope.  No book.  We kept moving at sixty miles per hour and she repeatedly said, “I still see it!”  We didn’t.  Finally she pointed and said, “It’s right there!”  She was pointing to the horse that was part of the logo on a Ford Bronco.  Sure enough.  She did indeed see a horse.

Last night, I was in the car again traveling through Dallas with a friend.  I did not see a horse.  What I saw was a car in front of us with a bumper sticker that said “FUCK BIDEN” is great big letters.  So many thoughts went through my head at that moment.  The one that has remained, though, is remembering that observant two year-old in the backseat thirty years ago.  She recognized animals…and she also knew her letters.  Had she seen the bumper sticker that I saw last night, her innocent little voice would likely have asked, “Mama, what does F-U-C-K say?”  (When you are a visually impaired mother, you teach your children the alphabet as soon as possible so that they can help you read signs.  She took that job seriously.)  My two year old grandson also knows many of his letters.  Fortunately, he is more interested in watching the big trucks and what they are hauling down the highway rather than looking at logos and disgusting bumper stickers.

I share this not to start a political debate, but to bring to light the hypocrisy practiced by those who are the type to place a FUCK BIDEN sticker on the bumper of their minivan!  These are the same people who lead the efforts to have books that they find offensive removed from the shelves of both school and public libraries.  Parents have lobbied to have Hop On Pop by Dr. Seuss banned claiming that it causes children to use violence against their fathers.  Louise Fitzhugh’s 1964 book Harriet the Spy has also faced opposition from parents because it supposedly encourages children to spy, lie, and swear.  Apparently real life swearing at and showing disrespect to the president of the country is OK they just don’t want any fictional cursing or misbehaving.

Do you see the hypocrisy here?

Let’s not even talk about all the books that parents want banned because they talk about real and pertinent subjects like race, religion, coming of age, gender identity, the biology of puberty, sex, abuse, or homosexuality.  Why do we need books to intelligently and creatively approach these topics when we can say it all in a two word bumper sticker?

Maybe they only need those two words.  I need some clarification.

Is FUCK talking about sex?  Abuse?  Sexual abuse?  Rape?  No.  It can’t be that because they don’t want to read about those things.

And who exactly is being commanded to FUCK BIDEN?  A women?  Is she married?  If not, fucking Biden is fornication.  If she is, then it’s adultery.  A sin of the flesh either way so in the minds of those who would proudly don this bumper sticker, so if a woman followed the command she’d be screwed, or is it fucked?

I guess that means that it is the man’s job to fuck Biden.  Oh wait!  That can’t be.  That’s homosexuality/  We can’t have that!  Another sin of the flesh.  No! No! No!

So who do they want to fuck Biden?

I’m so confused!

But not about hypocrisy.

 

And now you see why I haven’t been posting my writing publicly!