No going back now
The first time I visited Salem, Massachusetts, I felt – SOMETHING. I felt it in the air. How could one NOT feel SOMETHING? Reminders of that terrible time in our history were all around.
And though the community of Salem as it is today is a beautiful place where people walk, laugh, and shop freely, there was a time when it wasn’t.
That time of hangings, hatred, hysterical mobs, and calls of witches should never be forgotten. But it seems, alas, that the GOP HAS forgotten.
We see this in their hateful hysteria. These days, republicans have turned into those hysterical mobs of the past. They’ve gone back in time and become that which should never again be.
They want to ban EVERYTHING. And now there is something new on the ban list — Dolly Parton. It was inevitable, folks. Abortion. Books. Tampons. Wouldn’t you know music would be next on the list?
School administrators in Wisconsin — Waukesha, Wisconsin, have forbidden first graders from singing the song “Rainbow.”
For those who don’t know, Rainbow is a song Dolly and her goddaughter Miley Cyrus performed together. Cyrus wrote it.
The school explained the song was just too controversial: “Wouldn’t it be nice to live in paradise/Where we’re free to be exactly who we are?”
THOSE are some of the lyrics. That lovely paragraph above is now banned in Waukesha.
Critical race theory is entwined in the lyrics! That is what one school board member reportedly howled out.
And some teachers at the school say the students were excited to sing the song. And no wonder. Singing is also an intricate part of school years. Music sung in youth is poetry that never leaves one’s soul. Only now, in Waukesha, these children won’t get the chance to.
I have something to say to ALL Republicans behind the bans — the ones who would ban books, who would ban abortion, who would ban artwork, and Dolly Parton.
Dear Republican crazies:
People like to read—People likes to sing. People want to paint and write and create.
People also like to have sex, something that seems to scare the heck out of you.
People also want to read about black history, something ELSE that appears to frighten you.
People like to do a lot of things and have the right to do them as long as they’re legal.
I don’t know why, dear republicans, you have so many hangups.
It’s sad because these hangups and phobias of yours have become an addiction. Your whole life is spent looking for things to ban and be afraid of. You’re so scared of LIFE, Republicans. And you need to get a clue.
These bans will be yet another thing we hold up to the voters as elections draw nearer. After all, the majority of people do not want to go back to those days.
Those days are the days of panic, hysteria, mob rule, group-think, being guilty of the crime of being free, of frenzied mobs obliterating anything in their path to imagined salvation. We’ve come a long way since “those days.” And there’s no way in HELL we’re ever going back.
