Two Parades, Two Cultures
June 29, 2018
ALAN writes:
Sixty years ago this month, my classmates and I marched in our parochial school parade. It began at the church and proceeded along the streets of our neighborhood for about a mile. Then all the children spent the day at the picnic rides and games. We were not there to express outrage or protest or make demands.
Color slides taken by my mother show my classmate and best friend, Jeff, and me in our pastel shirts walking in the parade and riding on the merry-go-round: Innocent childhood fun in a strong Catholic parish in a clean, orderly, all-white neighborhood where standards were upheld and lawlessness was negligible.
Last weekend, the St. Louis Public Library presented its “Gay Pride Parade” as part of its enthusiastic and unwavering support for every Leftist political cause your readers could name.
Such a parade would have been unthinkable to American libraries in 1958, as would: Pandering to the lowest common denominator; acquiring books that celebrate thugs, whores, and profanity; stocking a children’s department with hundreds of new books slickly designed and intended to promote political causes; endorsing suicidal public policies like diversity and multiculturalism; offering music CDs that celebrate the vile noise called rap music; indulging in saccharine sloganeering like “The Library Rocks!”; presenting “tributes” to psychedelic rock “music”; and banning the celebration of Christmas.
More proof of Lawrence Auster’s observation that what Americans could not have imagined in the 1950s, they make mandatory today.
People who permit such revolutionary changes to their culture do not have much moral-philosophical substance to begin with. They are easy prey for well-trained agitators, provocateurs, and Fabian change agents. Not only do they lack sales resistance to bad ideas, they are incapable of understanding why those ideas are bad. In other words: They are typical products of modern indoctrination-mendaciously-called-“education”.
Laura writes:
When libraries stop defending high culture, they start defending low culture.
High culture is racist and elitist. That’s not their mission anymore.
