She knows that she is not supposed to be on the bed without invitation. But when Mom is not around to monitor, the rules get a little looser. In fact, she has a habit of jumping on the bed as soon as I come around. As if I am going to just stand by and let her take my space on the bed. Usually, I am just passing by and I have to shoe her back down to the floor.

The real reason that I took the picture was actually the book. But, since the dog was on the bed, she got in the shot as well. I had an extended weekend of babysitting a couple of weeks ago. One of the things that we did was read books on Thursday night before bed. Friday was a work day for me as well as camp for her. We definitely needed a normalcy strategy.

The first book we read was Where the Wild Dads Go. It is a take off or recent release of the book Where the Wild Things Go. That was the book I read when I was young. It was very short and so on to the second book, If I Ran the Zoo by Dr. Seuss. This was one from our library of books that comes from the era of reading to my own kids every night.

Reading time was something that I looked forward to every night. We started very young at even infant age. Some nights, I would read the book that I was reading. I figured that they really didn’t know what was going on and so reading was part of the routine. But, as the kids aged into comprehension, the focus shifted into age appropriate books and If I Ran the Zoo was on rotation of forty or so books.

As my kids got out of lap size, we migrated to more mature books like the Harry Potter series. But, they learned how to read themselves and we found that they would read ahead and even finish the book before we could read it as a family. And so, reading before bed shortly came to an end.

We even tried to incentivize reading as a family by trying to wait to rent the movie before we had completed the book. But, this was the time that I was travelling heavily and eventually those standards quickly got bent. My wife was also running the dance studio and bedtime as well as family time became significantly less routinely structured and idealistic.

Its funny, I haven’t read this book in the neighborhood of eight to ten years. Despite that, the words roll of my tongue like it was yesterday. I know that Dr Seuss can be a sing-songy. But, he also uses made up words that trip you up if you are not ready to pronounce them correctly. I anticipated those things because I was so familiar and we breezed through the book as if was a normal reading night.

I know that Dr. Seuss was taken down by the woke police. I understand that the way people talked and acted in days gone by are not exactly acceptable in today’s paradigms. This book is actually one of the titles specifically identified as controversial. But, I actually believe that Dr. Suess didn’t necessarily mean harm any more than good.

History is just that. You can easily search the term ‘historically racist presidents’ and find the argument that Thomas Jefferson was one. Yes, it is a complicated subject. He was a slave owner and yet coined the phrase ‘all men are created equal’. I really don’t want to expand the discussion into a whole new dimension and so I will leave all the specifics here. My point here was that I think that is clear that Jefferson contributed significantly more good than bad.

It is pretty hypocritical to celebrate the first amendment and condemn the dangers of book banning and such only to turn around and censor work that has been in the public orbit for up to ninety years. I think that what is lost here is that our culture has forgotten its historical origins For instance, the legal system requires intent for a crime to be present. We have changed the burden of proof from intent of harm to ‘I feel bad as a result’ and that is good enough.

Of course, our legal system has different aspects. For instance on the civil front, then there is a lessor standard of guilt. However, a civil case must have damages to valid and have a case. What are the damages from offensive words or pictures, especially when there is a right to say whatever you want? You see this is the problem, we have succeeded philosophical, moral authority on all issues.

End Your Programming Routine: This is not an endorsement to be racist or even offensive. I am advocating for things to be the what they are, like children’s stories from a past era. Maybe we should choose to throw away books where we encounter such feeling rather than mounting campaigns based on our own insecurities. At least, that is what I would do if I ran the zoo.