King Vitaman & The Anti-Woke Trend Of Book Banning
“I don’t read. I can’t read, my parents figured I’d be better off without the burden of written language.” - Lord Hambersham, DDS
King Vitaman, for a while in the 1970s, was one of the few cereals to feature a real person on the box at the time. That person was actor George Mann, who died in 1977. He also portrayed the King in commercials for the cereal. He would grace the cover of the box for years to come, until in 2000 Quaker Oats finally retired his face in lieu of a silly wizard that would remain there until King Vitaman cereal was shelved in 2019. That's right, up until four years ago, King Vitaman could still be found on shelves, though you've probably never seen it. That's because it only had six grams of sugar per serving, compared to the hefty 13 grams+ found in cereals like Lucky Charms.
The draw of King Vitaman was its high vitamin and iron content, along with the lesser volume of sugar. This made it appealing to anemic people apparently. It had a crunchy corn-based flake thing, not really a flake, more like a blob of crunch. Introduced in 1968, it's still one of the more nostalgic cereals to have left the market, as indicated by this petition to bring it back. It was introduced in an era that found itself drowning in sugared cereal, and it's a surprise it made it through the Saturday morning cartoon era. But then, it was made by Quaker Oats and if you are buying a Quaker Oats product, you know why you are buying it. We don't eat all that fiber just for the shits, sometimes the giggles.
Florida teachers have been told to remove books from their personal classroom libraries under threat of felony charges by the state of Florida, a policy championed by little despot Governor Ron DeSantis. His thinking is that books are making kids "woke" by exposing them to "leftist" ideologies. The truth is that DeSantis has the power to protect the GOP legacy of keeping the public stupid, starting with children. It's much easier to retain power when you are shitty by raising a generation unable to learn anything but what you want them to. That's the real fear here, the right-wingers are afraid their own children might learn more about the world than what they are told at home, and like all authoritarian regimes, knowledge scares them.
And this should scare us. This is not something happening in another country or another time, it’s something happening now. They are literally banning books that they don’t like because of their indoctrinated hate and bigotry. LGBTQ+ character? Ban it. Accurate history of treatment of minorities in the United States? Ban it. To have a book allowed back on the shelves, the decision is no longer in the hands of teachers, but rather librarians. This doesn’t sound too bad, but it’s a bottleneck to prevent kids from reading.
We make jokes on Twitter, but this is just the start and will spread to other states. The GOP functions (and retains power) by keeping the populace uninformed, ignorant and as racist as them. The best way to do that is to remove any ability to become more self-informed. The best time to do that is when the populace is unable to fend for themselves and relies on their already MAGA-influenced parents.
The good news is, the internet exists. While banning of books might have held more weight before the internet, now it just gives kids a list of things they want to read more than ever. Because what happens when you tell a kid they can’t do something? They find a way to do it. Not only that, but they’ll remember who told them they can’t, and hold that grudge til they can vote.
From the proprietary sandwich generation tool:
Irish Bacon & White American With Grapes On Sacramental Bread.
Like data, information can be disseminated and stored in different ways based on the end user. How we access that information has changed in such ways to the point we almost consume too much information on a daily basis. If we do, so do our children. Attempting to limit that consumption of information is not only a futile effort, but an extremely dumb one as well. Restricting access to information only speaks to the inherent value of that information. This often results in a more hardened search for that information. While some demographics don’t yet have that access to search for more information, they soon will. Curiosity gets piqued and they go and find it.
How we store and what we do with that information often can be the deciding factor in the continuance of the validity of that information. That’s the wall that stands in the face of education. That’s the hope of those that want to control the flow of information and they types of information that can be consumed. They hope it runs into a wall of indecision, a block that cannot be traversed. But the truth is that the wall is tissue paper. There are so many sources of information, the same information, everywhere all at once. This river cannot be dammed, not in the 21st century and not by the idiots pouring the concrete.
ncG1vNJzZmirpae%2Fpq3LnJyrnZGhe7TBwayrmpubY7CwuY6pZqShnpx6t7XTmqSapl2Wu6V506GcZpmeqbZuw86knGasopq7pQ%3D%3D