The American Association for Library Service to Children has removed Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from one of its awards. They’re changing the name to Children’s Literature Legacy award. Read the article Here
For those who may not know that name, this is the Author of The Little House on the Prairie series of books. You know, an American Classic. The books are considered semi-autobiographical.
This is being done because in the books she implies Native Americans were not people, and later describes African American people as “Darkies”.
Laura Ingalls Wider was born in 1867. The books were published between 1932 and 1943.
Since the books are semi-autobiographical in nature, it is not surprising that they might contain some racist stereotypes. From the perspective of the author, these stereotypes would have been a normal part of her lexicon and she wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with using them.
Once again the PC police are subjecting classical literature to the standards of today. Who’s next? Mark Twain? After all, his writings speak of a black man who was a slave.
I honestly don’t see the point. Why waste the energy to rename awards? In the words of a famous politician, “What does it matter at this point anyway,”
I read about stuff like this and think Fahrenheit 451, or the book burnings of Nazi Germany.
Authors create snapshots of their times and environment. Without those perspectives from more or less “average people” I feel we risk losing something of ourselves. This is especially concerning if we continue moving toward editing our past just because our current standards are rightfully different from those of our past.
Maybe I’m worried over nothing, in fact, were I in my twenties reading this, I’d probably give it no thought. But one benefit of age is perspective.
It’s not about looking back fondly on older times. It’s the realization that one of the best ways to mark progress is to look at where we’ve been. In that, literature gives us a view that we might otherwise not have. A first person narrative while biased, allows us to see what was normal and contrast that with what is normal, for better or worse.
Appeasements typically don’t work, ask Neville Chamberlain. If you don’t know who that is, look him up. He & Hitler had an interesting relationship.
This kind of renaming and whitewashing of history is nothing more than appeasement. In the long run, one incident isn’t significant, but when the appeasements add up well, Poland gets annexed.
Even if you don’t agree, give it some thought and figure out where you personally would draw the line.
Why is it that almost every single company you apply to for a job asks for you to create an account on their site?
There are currently something like 300 accounts stored in my web account password manager, at least 250 of those are from sites that I don’t visit or have only visited one time. Yet each one of those entries represents a corporation that has some amount of my personal information. This is information that I shared in the hopes of getting a job and it’s information that is no longer under my control.
Do you really want your employer, your date, spouse, or your mother, to know about that rather large kinky sex toy you purchased on Dec 27 2005 at 3 PM in Los Angeles? Or how about that time when you went to a shooting range with your boyfriend?
One of my coworkers was showing me some stuff in augmented reality. This led to a discussion about virtual reality. 
Then I thought about all the ancient civilizations scattered around the world. Broken stones standing in mute testament to a people who were gone. Our archeologists trying to piece together a civilization from fragments left behind. What would they think of our civilization after it passed?
What we do not understand is why each dwelling has only one or two individuals. In many cases the individuals seem to have died at different times. We can deduce this because in some cases of two individuals being present, we have found that one of the individuals was encased in a large sack. Often the second individual was discovered in a reclining position in close proximity on a piece of furniture specifically built to maintain this Skyward looking pose. Our testing on the material of the various sacks, suggest that an intact sack would have been air and water tight.
What if Atlantis was a High Technology Civilization surpassing our own? What if they actually did destroy themselves with that technology. What if the legends we have of magic are actually descriptions of technology that have been watered down through the ages?
It’s possible that artifacts in museums around the world are not what the arbitrary placards say they are. What if the oddball items are in fact technology that we don’t recognize as technology because it’s beyond our understanding.
Without a schematic or pin out description of a particular chip, I couldn’t even apply power to most of the chips used in our technology today. That’s coming from a guy who’s been working in technology for over 30 years.
I guess it’s that I am really old, or that she was really young but I couldn’t help but laugh.
They can’t imagine no running water, or the electricity being out. 
Life is change.
We know that asteroid impacts have wrought apocalyptic destruction on our world in the past. It’s reasonable to expect that it could happen again. Would humanity, if it survived, have to start over from the stone age?