It’s not secret that I running and swimming are a combination of therapeutic and meditative. I frequently have my best thoughts while engaged in either activity and today was no exception.

As is the case here in SC at 7AM today it was humid, the air heavy and the pool much warmer than is optimal for swimming laps so it was a chore to just get there. I did, though, put on my goggles, my snorkel (makes it even more meditative to not have to raise up to breathe), slipped on my neoprene gloves to aid in resistance and better the workout, put on my H20 Tri Sport earphones and fire up the music and start my apple watch on “pool swim”. I pushed off the wall and it was a good 10-15 laps (at least 3 songs) before I started to develop a rhythm and drifted off to “thoughtville”.

Today’s “topic” was why the current mood in many places is to ban books, ideas and dismantle things that have helped move our nation to preeminence since 1776. As the title suggests the light came on at the end of one of those tough laps. People, groups, parties, only want to ban ideas when they are afraid of them. Why is it, exactly, that many religious groups (while spouting “love thy neighbor” or “do unto others…” can’t say enough bad, divisive things about other religions. I was raised a roman catholic and it was drilled into me that Catholicism was the “one true religion”. Why? I would ask and in grammar school (we were k-8 back then) the answer was that it was the “word of god”. When I reached HS (another catholic school) I was lucky…it was not the indoctrination setting, though we were required to take a religion class each year, but those classes were more philosophy than dogma. We were encouraged to learn about our religion, but we were also encouraged to learn about as many other belief systems as we could, many times the classes were structured around a “compare and contrast” approach. Never were we taught that the other beliefs were evil or wrong, just that they were different and we were encouraged to decide for ourselves as we moved along the cradle-grave timeline. The same was true about race (even though out of a class of 235 boys there were exactly 4 who did not have the same skin color as I did). We were taught, in depth, about the horrors of the Holocaust. No one was afraid that the “jews” would poison our minds. We were taught, in depth, that the rise of Hitler was one of complicity but also fear and we were taught to be on the lookout for any subsequent rise in such feelings. We were taught, in depth, and discussed, in great detail, that the nation was built on the backs of enslaved people. There was no “critical race theory” discussion, it was simply the facts of history and what was a very dark period in a “free country” where “free” meant only white men of means (hmmm, sound familiar??) No one tried to deny it happened, there was no attempt to ban Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn (both of which were required reading), or Catcher in the Rye, or the like…many of these were either assigned and discussed throughout the school year, or on summer reading lists (also required with some room for choice). We not only read and discussed Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, but we were “schooled” in how it came about and how hard it was for her to actually get published, being a woman in that time.

That brings me up to current times: There are many places where teachers, trained professionals, and boards of education and administrators, are under pressure by parents on what curriculum to choose. Why? Do I approach my doctors and TELL them what medications to provide? I can ask, and I can choose to go elsewhere if I disagree, but to demand? for me to tell the AMA what is true and should be taught is laughable, yet, parents want to tell districts what to put or pull from the library and what to put or pull from the curriculum. Why? Easy answer….they are afraid of what their children might discover that is different from the way they choose to indoctrinate without the opportunity for discussion and opposition.

We start with slave deniers, move to Holocaust deniers, then 9/11 deniers, then the Alex Jones type of deniers such as he was with the Newtown, CT shootings in 2012, all the way up to the climate change deniers (all you gotta do is look at the statistics to see that). It’s fear…fear of something different from you.

I’ll leave this with a quote from a show I was watching about the rise of “Shock Jocks” and it traced the rise of Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh. An interviewer asked someone why they listen to Rush Limbaugh the answer was another light…very simply the answer was “I listen to Rush because he tells me what I want to hear” Chew on that as you close this down…this person did not want facts, information, good or bad…they only wanted to listen to what they already wanted to hear…

#project2025 is looking to return to the dark ages”…freedom dies in the dark but lives in the light search for the light even if it’s not what you may want to read or hear…