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We're Scaring Our Children to Death by Peggy Noonan, WSJ
This week saw a small and telling controversy involving a mural on the walls of Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles. The mural is big--400 feet long, 18 feet high at its peak--and eye-catching, as would be anything that "presents a colorful depiction of the rape, slaughter and enslavement of North America's indigenous people by genocidal Europeans." Those are the words of the Los Angeles Times's Bob Sipchen, who noted "the churning stream of skulls in the wake of Columbus's Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria."What is telling is not that some are asking if the mural portrays the Conquistadors as bloodthirsty monsters, or if it is sufficiently respectful to the indigenous Indians of Mexico. What is telling is that those questions completely miss the point and ignore the obvious. Here is the obvious:
The mural is on the wall of a public school. It is on a public street. Children walk by.
We are scaring our children to death. Have you noticed this? And we're doing it more and more.
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (1)
at 19:36 on May 13th, 2007
Protecting the tender, innocent eyes of our young is not an easy task, especially with our media capabilities now able to connect us with disasterous news from all corners of the world, and history, as it has been studied in our schools, hasn't been completely forthright to scare any of us into action to change the way people carry out warfare. It's sad, but when will the images of rape and warfare force us to change our behaviors? Perhaps, when we have seen it firsthand or finally had enough of violence. It's not that I don't agree with you, I just don't see any solutions to your immediate concerns written in this story, or research as to why this mural was painted there in the first place. How can one mural on one school wall create such an important question without further investigation regarding the fears of our children? More examples of how we are doing this and the effect it is having would be a great addition here.