“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.“
The School Board in McMinn County, Tennessee recently announced a decision to ban author and creator Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus from their eighth-grade curriculum.
McMinn County, TN may be a poster child for the current divisiveness in America.
This rural county is home to just 54,000 residents and until very recently, was over 90% white.
As a whole, the State of Tennessee has been, and remains, predominantly Christian. About 81% of the population identifies as Christian, and 52% of Tennessee residents identify as Evangelical Protestants.
Plagued by the legacy of a mediocre public education system, poverty is rampant in McMinn County: Over 17% of residents live below the poverty line, including 24% of children (under 18) and 12% of seniors (65 and over).
The McMinn County School Board recent action helps to reinforce the notion that adults who themselves are products of a mediocre public education system are often incapable of making sound and fully informed decisions based on solid facts. Or, we might say that these folks have been deprived of critical thinking skills due to the inadequacy of their public school system.
Over the past decade, we have witnessed an alarming increase in public displays of frustration, rebellion and even violence among adults who are constrained by the toxic combination of extreme religious ideologies and vulnerability to unreliable or false sources for (mis)information.
George Orwell was correct, and only WE can prevent the vociferous minority from subsuming the will of the majority.
walrus51 