LyndaGood

To Kill a Mockingbird is SUPPOSED to make people uncomfortable! It’s about racism, injustice, and the ugly side of human nature. Did we miss the part where books are supposed to make us THINK?

If we’re going to ban every book that makes someone uncomfortable, we’d better start with history textbooks. God forbid we learn something unpleasant about ourselves. The real question isn’t why this book makes people uncomfortable.

It’s why the hell we’re more concerned about protecting people from uncomfortable conversations than preparing children to recognize injustice when they see it. Read the book. Have the conversation. Grow the hell up. The world isn’t going to get less ugly by pretending the ugly parts don’t exist.

To Kill a Mockingbird is SUPPOSED to make people uncomfortable! It’s about racism, injustice, and the ugly side of human nature. Did we miss the part where books are supposed to make us THINK?

Schools are supposed to teach children how to think critically, recognize injustice, and question the world around them. Not wrap them in cotton wool and pretend the ugly parts of history never happened.

Here’s a thought: Instead of removing the book, TEACH THE DAMN BOOK! Discuss it. Challenge it. Explain it. Let students wrestle with the hard questions. You don’t fight prejudice by hiding the evidence of it. You fight it by teaching people to recognize it.

To Kill a Mockingbird is SUPPOSED to make people uncomfortable! It’s about racism, injustice, and the ugly side of human nature. Did we miss the part where books are supposed to make us THINK?

Apparently, we’ve reached the point where we’d rather ban a book about racism than risk making someone uncomfortable by discussing racism. Well, isn’t that convenient? Sweep the problem under the rug, throw a book on top of it, and congratulations! Racism is solved!

Since when did being uncomfortable become a legitimate excuse for being ignorant? Harper wrote a book that challenges prejudice.School district’s solution is to remove it from the reading list because it makes people uncomfortable.That’s like canceling a fire drill because the alarm is too loud.

People bashing that banana that was taped to a wall when this is literally nothing

What happens to a society when we spend so much time teaching people who to fear, who to blame, and who to hate? We have watched hatred grow throughout history. We know what happened when Hitler convinced an entire nation that Jewish people were the enemy.

If we keep teaching people to hate one another, what exactly have we learned? We cannot keep condemning the hatred of the past while making excuses for the hatred of the present. Humanity doesn’t become better by deciding which people deserve dignity.

It becomes better when we recognize that dignity belongs to all of us. And if we have forgotten that, perhaps the problem isn’t just the hatred we see around us. Perhaps it’s how easily we’ve learned to live with it.

And we should never be so arrogant as to believe that such cruelty could never happen again simply because we know how the last chapter ended. Every person killed by violence leaves someone who will never see them walk through the door again.

Every family shattered by hatred is left with an emptiness that no political argument, religious justification, or angry speech can ever fill. We are supposed to have learned something from history.

Hatred doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It grows when people feed it, when leaders exploit it, when neighbors repeat it, and when we stop questioning the voices telling us whom to blame.

The Holocaust didn’t begin with gas chambers. It began with prejudice, dehumanization, discrimination, and the acceptance of the idea that some people were worth less than others. We should never forget that.

Still judging entire groups by their religion, their skin color, their nationality, or the actions of someone who shares their background. How are we any better when we allow hatred to decide who deserves our compassion?

We don’t have to agree with one another. We don’t have to share the same faith, politics, or beliefs. But disagreement should never mean that someone else’s life is worth less than ours.

Millions were murdered because they were made to seem less human, less deserving, less worthy of living. And yet here we are, generations later, still drawing lines between us and them.

POLITICAL JUNK MAIL NEEDS TO STOP! I am sick to death of opening my mailbox and finding it stuffed with political garbage. Glossy postcards, ridiculous slogans, smug faces, and promises that sound like they were written by someone who thinks voters were born yesterday. WHAT A WASTE!

And if you can’t get my attention without flooding my mailbox with expensive junk, maybe your campaign has a bigger problem than you realize. SAVE YOUR PAPER. SAVE YOUR POSTAGE. SAVE YOUR MONEY.

Because the only thing your political junk mail is guaranteed to change is the weight of my recycling bin. And frankly, my recycling bin has contributed more to cleaning up this mess than some politicians ever will.

For WHAT? To tell me the other candidate is terrible? To repeat the same promises? To remind me, for the fifteenth time, that you think you’re God’s gift to politics? I DON’T NEED MY MAILBOX TURNED INTO A DUMPSTER FOR YOUR POLITICAL EGOS!

You want my vote? Tell me what you’ve done. Tell me what you plan to do. Show me results. Give me something more substantial than a glossy photograph and a pile of campaign bullshit.

GET OVER YOURSELVES! Every one of those mailings costs money. Printing. Paper. Postage. Millions of dollars being spent to produce garbage that people toss out without even reading. And we’re supposed to believe these people care about wasteful spending? The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

We have people struggling to pay bills, communities desperate for funding, and real problems that need attention. Yet campaigns can burn through piles of money just to shove another picture of a politician into my mailbox.

Do these politicians actually believe that sending me the same crap ten times is going to change my mind? What am I supposed to do?Have a religious experience over a postcard?Fall in love with a candidate because they sent me a professionally airbrushed picture of themselves grinning like an idiot?

Look at the walking monument to human failure. A man with the character of a sewer rat, the integrity of a crooked carnival barker, the compassion of a vulture, and the intellectual depth of a mud puddle.

This is what happens when a nation becomes so drunk on power and hatred that it starts mistaking its own worst instincts for greatness. A country that once claimed to stand for something has reduced itself to defending a man who embodies so much of what it pretends to despise.

And somehow, the greatest disgrace isn't that this man occupies the highest office in the land. It's that so many people looked at him, saw exactly who he was, and decided that was the kind of man America deserved.

A bottomless pit of vanity, vindictiveness, and greed wrapped in a designer suit, strutting around like the world should kiss the ground beneath his feet. He has the soul of a tyrant, the manners of a drunken bully, and the conscience of a man who sold his for a tax break.

@abdulelsayed.bsky.social

Every insult is projection, every accusation a confession, every public appearance another reminder that shame has become an extinct species. He confuses cruelty with courage, ignorance with honesty, and blind obedience with patriotism.

LyndaGood reposted

Abdul El-Sayed

This is Tommy. Tommy had a question about my allegiances. Listen to the end to hear about his.

reuters.comShooter kills four at Oregon elementary school and is shot dead by citizenA 16-year-old shooter opened fire on Thursday at an elementary school in Bend, Oregon, killing four people including three children before being killed by an armed person who had pursued the assailan...

At five, you’re still learning how to tie your shoes. You still need someone to cut your food. You fall asleep in the car on the way home. You believe the adults in your life can protect you from just about anything. Imagine being the parent who dressed that child Thursday morning.

Except those parents won’t get to forget. They won’t get to move on because somebody else has decided the conversation is over. So before anyone tells me this is just another tragedy, understand something. A tragedy is something terrible that happens.

When we keep allowing the same horror to happen to our children, we have to ask what the hell we are choosing to tolerate. And if that question makes you uncomfortable, good. It should.

What kind of freedom requires a five year old to risk their life to get an education? There is no answer that makes that acceptable. Somewhere tonight, a child’s bedroom will remain untouched. A little pair of shoes will sit by the door.

A parent will have to face the unbearable fact that the person they would have died to protect is gone. And tomorrow, the sun will rise. The buses will run. The news will move on. People will disagree, argue and forget.

What does it say about us when we can absorb this news between a weather report and an advertisement, feel sad for thirty seconds, and carry on with our day? I don’t want another politician telling me how deeply disturbed they are. I want to know what they’re willing to change.

I don’t want another carefully staged moment of silence. I want to know why we keep asking children to live with dangers the adults in charge refuse to confront. And I don’t want to hear that this is simply the price of freedom.

We have turned the deaths of children into a political debate. We have turned grieving parents into familiar faces on the news. We have made school shootings so routine that people are already reaching for the same tired words before the blood has even dried.

And that might be the most horrifying part of all. The children are dead. But the rest of us are in danger of losing something, too: our ability to be horrified. What does it say about a country when a dead five year old is no longer enough to bring it to its senses?

Maybe you reminded them to grab their backpack. Maybe they complained about breakfast. Maybe you told them you loved them and promised you’d see them after school. You were supposed to see them after school. Instead, you’re facing a future you never agreed to live.