Relax! No One is Coming For Your “Green Eggs and Ham.”

Photo by Catherine Hammond on Unsplash

Yesterday was the birthday of beloved children’s author ‘Dr. Suess’. It was also the day that the company which owns the rights to his books, Dr. Suess Enterprises, announced that it would no longer publish six of his books because of their outdated racist imagery.

Fox News and other conservative outlets spent the day ranting against “cancel culture” and bemoaning the loss of access to Suess’s work. Many, many Americans agreed, and social media was deluged with complaints about censorship, book banning and overreactions by “woke” leftists.

Good heavens.

I am here to try to calm a few folks down. The prolific Dr. Suess did write 60 children’s books, after all, so even if six of them fall out of use, it’s not as if the man himself is being erased from history.

Here’s the thing, friends. Society evolves and grows. It changes over time, and that’s a very very good thing.

When my Dad was a child, back in the 1930s, he used to figure out whose turn it was to play by reciting, “Eeny-meeny-miney-moe, catch a n*^#ger by the toe.” By the time I was growing up in the ’50s and ’60s, we said “catch a tiger by the toe.” Because times had changed, and society was showing a bit of progress.