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“The Nazis were monsters to kill little girls.” “I know that’s what people say,” Mr. Stempel told her. “But most of them weren’t. They were just ordinary people. That’s what makes them so terrifying. Monsters you can fight. But when the people who come for you in the night are your neighbors and coworkers and classmates . . . When you never know who’s sick and who’s not . . .” He shrugged.
“Hate is a disease, Dawn.”
“There’s a cure?” “Yes, and you have it,” Mr. Stempel said. “It’s the truth. It won’t work on everyone. But maybe your son isn’t too far gone.”
When you have everything, the only luxury left is taking things away from others. It was an indulgence that Lula Dean certainly seemed to relish.
How do you improve yourself without challenging your mind? How do you leave a better world for your children?
As far as he was concerned, if your faith was shaken by foul words or sex scenes, then you must not have had very much to begin with.
“Yeah, well, don’t give her too much credit. She didn’t invent it. Using fear to control people is about as old as time.”
Gather as much knowledge as you can, because information is power. And choosing how to use it is freedom. The more you know, the freer you will be.”
“Once Jesus arrived on the scene, all those Old Testament laws no longer applied. The New Testament tells us we’re supposed to follow Christ, not the old ways. And as far as I know, Jesus never said a damn thing about gay folks or barbecue. But he sure did talk a lot about love.”
Books would need to be banned and laws broken. Some parts of the Constitution might no longer apply to everyone. And there were sections of the Bible they’d have to ignore, starting with love thy neighbor.
Instead of an equitable future, they preached a return to a glorious past.
With the television off, all they’d had to guide them was common sense and good hearts. No one told them to be scared, so they weren’t. No one told them who their enemies were, so they didn’t have any. No one warned them to avoid dangerous books, so they read whatever called out to them—mostly John Grisham. And maybe he was wrong—maybe he’d just been a little kid—but everything had seemed perfectly fine. Keith prayed they could return to those days.
You get to choose whose footsteps you’ll follow, Jeanette Newman had told the young Beverly. Find a set that went in the right direction.
“Y’all want to know how to tell if you’ve been a good parent?” Moxie asked the crowd. “It’s real easy. If you have a family that loves each other and children who want to spend time with you, then you’ve been a good parent.”
But I fear there are more sinister elements at work behind the scenes. They know keeping people scared and ignorant is an effective means of controlling them. Removing books about the Holocaust makes it easier to use Jewish people as scapegoats. Banning works on the subject of slavery prevents conversations about what we owe the people this country so grievously injured. Convincing parents that novels featuring LGBTQ+ heroes can turn
their kids gay will distract them from the fact that American children keep dying from gun violence and our schools are woefully underfunded.
