New at The Library of Tomorrow
It is illegal for you to have received this in error*
So many students have asked our librarians for more information on the internet that we have run out of space in The Edward R. Murrow Memorial Re-education Center. Therefore, to better serve the public, we have devoted this month’s confiscations entirely to the subject. What follows is the definitive collection. Everything you need to know is contained herein.
Last month’s confiscations can be found here. This month’s sample selection comes from Robin Pedley’s “The Construction of Durable Echo Chambers: A Primer for Teens.”
To keep your students safe, you must protect them from their mistakes. You must train them in the iron law of cause and effect, and that if one pushes back hard enough, every failure is the result of the words and deeds of others long dead. If a student has failed, it is because of the purple people. If the student is purple, it is because of the greens. But one must be careful. Students must not learn to equate color with fear but rather with disgust. One might find the courage to confront one’s fears, but disgust has no champion. The greens must become so wretched that they cannot even be pitied. Their every success must be a threat, their every tragedy a cause for jest. Nothing a green says can ever be good. If they appear to speak the truth, it must be understood as a trick.
You cannot achieve this directly. Rather, you must teach your students that any symbols of the greens—their flags, their speech, their gestures—contain hidden subtext, foreign to them, that cannot be transgressed upon pain of violence or ostracism. Furthermore, these symbols must be so monolithic, so impenetrable, their owners so deplorable, that students become incapacitated with disgust and are unable to function outside the walls of their mistrust, which you have erected to spare them from all that would do them harm.
