FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
Please think of the children
Children's books will destroy our civilization
By Hamish MacAulayAugust is a long, lean time for political junkies. Desperate for anything to write about, the media latch on to Lucien Bouchard's psychiatric assessment or Clifford Olson's hearing the same way Calgarians hang on to the Spirit of '88. As usual, the Sun newspaper chain's timing is impeccable as it chooses the summer silly season to start yet another crusade to bring back the death penalty. Unfortunately for the Suns, Ted Byfields and Conrad Blacks of this world, the media battle for our political souls between the right and the left is over long before most of us even learn to read.
Even a casual scan of children's books, especially those designed for pre-schoolers, should be enough to convince anyone that the forces of socialism have a stranglehold on the impressionable minds of Canada's youth. Even as right wing standbys such as free markets, capitalism, and crime and punishment are boycotted by the authors of children's books, those lefty ideals of sharing, accepting cultural differences and forgiveness are taking over the vast world of toddler literature.
In a rare moment that shows how intolerance can create strange bedfellows, Sikh, Muslim and Christian groups in British Columbia are uniting over the issue of schools using books that depict homosexual lifestyles. With the resources at their disposal, they will wage a good fight against this perceived menace to the public good, but they will fail.
Grimm's fairytales, with their harsh moral lessons, do not dominate the kiddy bestseller list. You are not going to find tales of tolerance towards homosexuals either, although most of the cute, little animals used in children's stories are stunningly androgynous. Instead, you will find endless variations on the tolerance of the ugly duckling and endless tales of sharing your fortune with others. It is not the sort of thing good conservatives should be brought up on.
What conservatives have not caught on to is the fact that this sort of damage to a child's mind is irreparable. Our diligent right wing conscience seems more concerned with the passive damage created by television, although they have fallen asleep at the wheel there as well. Conservatives waste their time protesting good, old-fashioned violence when they should be fighting against Barney the dinosaur's socialism and naive remedies for the world we live in.
Many may scoff, but the development of the lucrative children's book industry during the '60s and '70s is closely correlated to the rise in power of the evil forces of liberalism and the subsequent destruction of North American society.
If conservatives ever want to win our hearts, they must start at a young age. The time has come for right wing scribes to put pen to paper and tell us the tales of Tommy the Gifted Peacock. A peacock wise enough to not share his natural gift, beautiful feathers, with other birds. Instead, he takes advantage of his special resource by selling his feathers. Using the money to diversify his portfolio, Tommy retires rich to live in a gated birdnest community. Secure from the riffraff, Tommy lives the life he deserves, waited on wing and claw by the foolish and impoverished birds who bought his feathers because the media controlled by Tommy's friends told them to.
Producing bland, uniform pap that only liberals and left wingers could be proud of, children's book authors have become the greatest proponents of the communist agenda since Pravda was privatized. The only problem is, without Tommy the Peacock to counterbalance these naive do-gooders, our children are doomed to follow the path of their parents and hasten the end of western civilization.
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