Twitter rant: Read bottom to top
To begin with, a sock twitter account for Laura Ingalls Wilder (the writer of the Little House On The Prairie books) was giving out the tweets of her family for New Year's.

Here's the one for her Ma:

HalfPintIngalls Laura Ingalls Wilder:

Ma's resolutions: knit more; be less racist.

Well... anyway, a nineteen tweet rant from another user followed. It's sort of epic.

troposphere
troposphr troposphere:

@HalfPintIngalls @sippey 'Be less racist'? That's what I call a cheap, defamatory shot. I read those books 100s of times, and

the only racism one can take away is whatever pre-existed in your own racist, bigoted head,

wherein you ascribe to an individual you've never met character traits based on nothing other than their skin color.

'Ma resolves to be less racist.' HAHAHA, that's teh funny.

If you'd actually read the books you would know that a black doctor treated them when they were all sick; that they

had never seen a black person before. You're incapable of reading any text & not injecting your defamatory illogic

whether or not the text in any way supports it. Bcs you were never college-educated, only college-indoctrinated

and taught to label all whites as racist and evil, and that the Indians/'First Nations'/Native Americans never went

around scalping one another, because you were brainwashed into believing any person of color is morally superior

You know who needs to make a new years resolution to be less racist? YOU do.

You don't understand, and therefore mock, people who actually apprehend God (the REAL God, not your crappy morally

relativistic 1, which you actually created in YOUR own image, whether they lived a century or two ago, a millennia

or 2 or 4 ago, or are one of your own contemporaries. In this regard you are hopelessly ignorant and blind; having

no idea of why you are even here in the first place. Blind, misled, and believing only in your psychobabble B.S.

What else have you been "taught"? To smear & denigrate the WASP pioneers/founders who made this country

the greatest nation in the history of mankind -- actually, they were only instruments of GOD, which you do not &

will never comprehend, because you don't know God and in fact have been taught to be actively hostile towards Him.

People like you, who have no comprehension of the what or why of the most basic principles of what this country is

about are simply tools, useful idiots, in the hands of those who seek to destroy America -- the REAL America, not

the bastardized, self-hating, self-loathing, apologetic, Marxist/Fascist false Obamatopia you seek to compel your

fellow citizens into climbing aboard that space-shuttle-disaster-in-the-making piece of crap Marxist state where

you believe there will be no more HAHA-Racist-HAHA Ma's -- only sub-human fascist slave-drones like yourselves.

(please note, the reason that it's formatted like this is because it was a series of nineteen tweets, which can only be 140 characters in length and each time they had to include the name of the people they were addressing)

And what does our dear Laura Ingalls Wilder have to say?

Laura Ingalls Wilder
HalfPintIngalls Laura Ingalls Wilder:

@troposphr You really ought to have Dr. Tann look at that muskrat bite because you're foaming at the mouth.

And that's that.

I think it's hilarious, in the same way I think watching my cat totally lose it on a paper crane is hilarious, but the topic of racism and racism in the Little House books as potential for discussion is definitely unfunny, so I put it here.

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ekaterinv
2011-01-04 07:43 am UTC (link)

I read all of Shakespeare's major plays before I was 10. I read lots of horrifically violent fairy tales before that.

I think you're drastically underestimating the capabilities of children. It's entirely possible to read The Secret Garden and books like it, as a child, and separate the parts that are bad stuff from the past, from the parts that are bad stuff we still grapple with today, from the parts that are good. I didn't have the tools of deconstruction and literary theory when I read them, but I still was able to think about how they portrayed different groups of people, gender roles, etc., and come to my own conclusions, since I was lucky enough to have a large number of different books to read, which helped me develop critical thinking skills, imagination and empathy.

I would even argue that it's necessary to read things like that in order to gain any view of history and people, and the fact that the world changes. Removing every book from the shelves that doesn't line up with modern mores AND that doesn't have problematic content would leave kids with very slim pickings indeed. Also, I don't trust people in power who want to keep reading material away from children.

Ten year olds miming murder? We're meant to be okay with that?

...yes? It's not like Macbeth is a mere game of cops and robbers; it has the message that murder is wrong. It's a very simple play, really. Ten year olds are entirely capable of separating pretend from real and of thinking about things on many complex levels.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	snarkhunter 2011-01-04 07:57 am UTC (link)
	Thank you. I feel like you've said what I was trying to get at, but my brain is too addled to make sense of it all. I had no idea that my gifted class was trying to brainwash us into playing killers, as opposed to introducing us to one of the English language's great writers. I don't trust people in power who want to keep reading material away from children. THIS. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	ms_treesap 2011-01-06 03:00 am UTC (link)
	I read all of Shakespeare when I was four, in the original Klingon. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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