Category Archives: Freedom

Books Matter in the Republic of the Imagination:

Classic Books, Freedom, Rebel

 

Perhaps people living under totalitarian regimes know better than the rest of us that books matter. In such countries people are not allowed to read any book they desire to read. They can only read the approved books. Those are the books that align well with the interests of those in power. If they want to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn they may not be able to do so. Even in Canada and the United States some people want to control the books that the rest of us read. Such people don’t believe in freedom of expression or the freedom to read. They usually have a “good cause” to justify their intrusions into our reading lives.  I am not saying all restrictions are unjustified intrusions. I am only saying we must be vigilant to ensure that only the very rare books justify such an intrusion.

That is why we learn that books really do matter. As Azar Nafisi said,

 

“…books matter, that they open up a window into a more meaningful life, that they enable us to tolerate complexity and nuance and to empathize with people whose lives and conditions are utterly different form our own.”

 

In unfree states, or in states on the road to unfreedom, such as perhaps the United States is headed, some people want to prevent others from reading anything contrary to the truths they hold dear. In Iran that means no deviance from the form of Islam the regime has approved. In the southern US that means no deviance from the approved belief among the powerful that the US is not a racist country. In some parts of the US, like Florida, among conservatives, that means no books that foster a view of gender and sexuality that fails to conform to the conventional wisdom of evangelical Christians. At least the children should not be allowed to read such books. They do not want others to have fellow feeling for those living lives different from their own.

Huck Finn refused to give obeisance to the conventional wisdom about race. He was the consummate rebel from the conventional wisdom. Nafisi put it well:

Huckleberry Finn is perhaps the most memorable of those humble citizens of the imaginary America who stand up to forces great and terrible, but Huck refuses to return home, thus foreshadowing the destinies and shaping the choices of so many other fictional American characters who either leave home, never return, or long to do so. Those homeless protagonists of American fiction become the true guardians of what is best in American individualism, never identifying happiness with wealth or power. Perhaps in no other fiction, in fact, is materialism so frowned upon, or defined as the root of so many evils—an ironic but salutary reminder for a country so blatantly devoted to the pursuit of wealth and power.

 

Only brave rebels like Huck Finn can resist the lure of that materialism. They make the mistake Bob Dylan warned about namely, “don’t go mistaking paradise for that home across the road.” Like Huck Finn who preferred the freedom of life on a raft to the comfortable but “smothery” home.

The members of the Republic of the Imagination are the writers, musicians and artists that are rebels who say no to the smothering ideology of the conventional wisdom. As Azar Nafisi said,

“All writers are strangers, or pariahs, as Hannah Arendt put it. They look at the world through the eyes of the outsider” but only the American writers turn this attribute into a national characteristic…we need to reflect on this constant restlessness, this unending questioning, this battle between the desire for prosperity and success and the urge to walk away from it all, to be wary of complacency—in short to perform the miracle of the small vagabond Huck, who followed his heart as he floated on a raft down the Mississippi.

 

That was why Huck decide to “light out for the territory” rather than be smothered in comfort. That is why Huck is a charter member of the Republic of the Imagination. But we can all join.

 Books matter in the republic of the Imagination; none more so than the classics like Huckleberry Finn.

Thinking not dying

Classic Books, Freedom, reason, Rebel, Social Democracy and Trust, The Sleep of Reason

 

Can great literature lead to great societies?

There is no obvious and direct link between democratic societies and great literature. As Joseph Brodsky correctly pointed out, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were all very literate men. That did not help societies in the countries they led. But that does not mean there is no connection.

Democratic societies, it has often been observed, need good citizens. Citizens who have not forgotten how important freedom is and know that to protect a fragile democracy—and all democracies are fragile—an alert and informed citizenry is essential. Azar Nafisi explained how books like the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were important as a consequence:

For this they need to know, to pause, to think, to question. It is this quality that we find in so many of America’s fictional heroes, from Huckleberry Finn to Mick Kelly in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. How can we protect ourselves from a country of manipulation, where tastes and flavors are re-created chemically in laboratories and given to us as natural food, where religion is packaged, televised, and tweeted and commercials influence us to such an extent that they dictate not only what we eat, wear, read, and want but what we know and dream. We need the pristine beauty of truth as revealed to us in fiction, poetry, music and the arts: we need to retrieve the third eye of the imagination.

Democracies can benefit from its citizens engaging in what Huck called “a long think.” Nothing is better for purpose than literature or art, or other works of the imagination. This is what Nafisi called “The Republic of the Imagination.” This is what allows us to live and avoid a smothery death.

In totalitarian societies people risk their lives to achieve this. The risks are clear and present. But even in democratic societies lives are at risk to, for smothered lives are not worth living.

People in totalitarian societies often appreciate the freedom to read much more acutely than citizens of democratic societies. But they are not the only ones. As Scout said in that wonderful book To Kill a Mockingbird, another classic, “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read.  One does not love breathing.”

In the Republic of the Imagination, as Nafisi says, “We must read, and we must continue to read the great subversive books, our own and others.”

And in my opinion there is no more subversive book than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. That is why it is a great book. Perhaps the best novel of all time. That is a possibility.  It is my favourite novel.  That is a certainty.

Tom Sawyer, who appears in this book at the beginning and then returns to wreak havoc near the end of the book, is completely befuddled by what he has “learned” from reading books. It gets Tom into trouble and more importantly endangers the lives of others, such as the slave Jim. He keeps insisting how they must conform to the books no matter how absurd and no matter how little he understands of what those books actually say. Sawyer is continually barking up the wrong reality tree.

 

Tom asks Huck, “Do you want to go doing something different from what’s in the books and get things all muddled up?” Huck agreed, saying: “all kings is mostly rapscallions…You couldn’t tell them from the real kind.” Huck’s conclusion was a sound one: “Sometimes I wish we could hear  of a country that’s out of kings.” Huck would appreciate the wisdom of John Lennon.

We can think or we can die. That is the  choice.

Avoiding a Smothery Death

Authoritarianism, Classic Books, Freedom, Rebel

 

I know I have been going too long about the wonderful book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But it is a classic and classics are worth it. At least in my opinion they are worth the extra time. I promise to bring these posts to a close soon. But I think there is so much to learn from that novel.

It is obvious that totalitarian societies impose horrendous encroachments on freedom.  Democratic societies are more subtle.

Of course, in a democratic society the arts of the imagination don’t usually threaten the state, but they help seduce us into what Nafisi e called “a paralysis of consciousness” and what she also referred to as “an intellectual indolence.” Both of those were  recognized by Huck Finn, though he expressed it in other words such as “smothery.” Huck Finn demonstrated that in order to avoid the “smothery” embrace of a conformist society it was absolutely necessary to rebel and “light out for the territories.” Nothing else will suffice.

Nazar Nafisi put the issue this way:

“Every state, including a totalitarian one, has its lures and seductions. The price we pay for succumbing is conformity, a surrender of one’s self to the dictates of the group. Fiction is an antidote, a reminder of the power of individual choice. Every novel has at its core a choice by at least one of its protagonists, reminding the reader that she can choose to be her own person, to go against what her parents or society or the state tell her to do and follow the faint but essential beat of her own heart.”

 

No one better exemplifies this awful choice more than Huck Finn who is willing to go to hell for doing the “wrong thing” so that he can save his friend Jim. Who is a better emblem of freedom and dissent from conformity that that?

Huck knows that to give in to “sivilization” and the Sunday school marms like Miss Watson, is to accept a “smothery” death and he won’t accept that. Instead, he will “light out for the territory” because  “there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.” Huck would not give up freedom for a comfortable home.

Huck was like the great artists mentioned by Nafisi when she said,

“What made Brodsky, Nabokov, Czeslaw Milosz and Hannah Arendt—all of whom took refuge in America (Einstein too for that matter)—resist the totalitarian states of their home countries and reject the empty temptations of Western democracies was essentially one and the same thing: they knew that to negate and betray that inner self was not just a surrender to the tyrant’s will but a sort of self-inflicted death. You become a cog in a vast and invisible wheel over which you have no control—Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, only without the comedy.”

Not for them a “smothery” death. Not for me either.

A Hit List or a reading list

Authoritarianism, Classic Books, Free Speech, Freedom, Truth Seeking

 

Azar Nafisi is a professor of literature now living in America, who originally taught literature in Iran.  In fact she taught American novels including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  She taught this amazing book, whose theme is freedom, to Iranians students in Tehran. Eventually Nafisi left Iran for freedom in America. She loves literature and the works of the imagination as I do. She is just much more eloquent than I am.  She said,

“The way we view fiction is a reflection of how we define ourselves a nation. Works of the imagination are canaries in the coal mine, the measure by which we can evaluate the health of the rest of society.”

 

She learned this, she says. She taught in the midst of a totalitarian society. In the novel Huck had an awful choice to make. He could choose to follow what he called his “conscience.” By that he really meant conventional morality. This is what he had been taught by his family, and his society around him. These were the authorities. If he followed them, he would bring the slave Jim back to his “rightful owner’ the good Christian Miss Watson. Or he could choose to follow what he had learned in his life with Jim—i.e. that Jim was the best of all the people he knew and he was his true friend and he should help him to freedom so Jim could reunite with his family. Huck chose to do what he thought was the wrong thing, the thing that would lead him to hell, but would save his friend. Could anyone ever have a better friend? He literally risked it all to save his friend.

The poet Joseph Brodsky, like Azar Nafisi, had been brought up in a totalitarian society. He in Russia; she in Iran. Both came to appreciate the revolutionary power of the imagination and works of the imagination. Not that they are a panacea. After all, Brodsky pointed out, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were all literate people who read lots of books. Brodsky said, the problem is “their hit lists were longer than their reading lists.”

That is why totalitarian states, and authoritarian leaders are so quick to attack books and the liberal arts. They know that these works are dangerous to the authoritarians.  Both, whether, from the left or the right, want to remove them at all costs. As Nafisi said, “They know the dangers of genuine free inquiry.” Some of these authoritarians even in the west, have tried to ban The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Why? They are doing it for the same reason the dictators did—i.e. to control the readers. They don’t want the readers to think.

 

Freeing the master and the slave and the victim

Classic Books, Freedom, racism

 

Azar Nafisi, the literature critic who wrote that wonderful book The Republic of the Imagination, points out how the slave Jim is the first person who encountered Huck after Huck staged his death in order to escape from his “smothery” world. Huck depends on Jim to show him how to survive on their raft. Nafisi said Jim “resurrects him.” He certainly frees Huck in more than one sense.

Later, when the white mob is after Jim, Huck literally saves or resurrects Jim from a watery grave. They save each other. They help each other to freedom. This is the central relationship in the novel.

This relationship in my mind proves that Mark Twain was right when he said, “Lincoln’s proclamation [when Abe Lincoln proclaimed slavery was abolished]…not only set the slaves free, but set the white man free also. White men were enslaved by a false and wicked ideology—white supremacy—from which they desperately needed freeing. Some have still not been freed.

According to Nafisi, later Huck realizes that “he needs to feel, to empathize with others in order to become more fully himself. All through their adventures Huck finds his own moral compass with the help of Jim. As soon as they meet under new circumstances, Jim is transformed from “Miss Watson’s nigger” to his best mate as they go from “he and I” to “we.”

This is how Huck and Jim free each other. That is a racist and non-racist can free each other. The Adventurers of Huckleberry Finn is a novel about freedom. This is its essential theme. It is a complex book in a simple form. I think it is the greatest American novel and might even be the greatest novel ever written.

In Canada Canadian non-indigenous people urgently need to be saved from their ideology of white supremacy. Allowing indigenous people to liberate themselves would lead to the liberation of non-indigenous people. This is an essential insight we can gain from reading a novel like the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

 

The Religious  Mob

Classic Books, Extremism, Fear, Freedom, Politics & Religion, Rebellion and Resistance

 

In the amazing novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when it is discovered that a slave has escaped from his master, a mob of white people—mainly good Christian white people—got excited and gave horrific chase to the slave aided and abetted by his young white friend. These were good ordinary citizens of America. They believed it was their religious duty to give chase to an escaped black slave and return him to his owner. Of course, it helped that they might reap a $40 reward from the owner. Is that all it takes?

 

Azar Nafisi was a Muslim woman living in Iran who taught Huckleberry Finn to young Islamic men and women.  By and large these students were respectful of the tyrannical regime in their country. Like good American citizens, they were good citizens and good Muslims? What would they think of Huck Finn?

The book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is as I have been saying a book about freedom and resistance to authority.  Those are both characteristics that have usually been absent in Iran. At least that was true until recently, when there have been some rebellion led by young women resisting the authority of the government to impose dress requirements upon them, as well as other even more important impositions on their freedom. The women have demonstrated uncommon bravery in the face of that tyranny. A number of them have been killed by the government for their opposition.

Mark Twain in that brilliant book showed how an uneducated white boy and his black slave friend revolted against the “conscience” of the nation. Most people in America, at the time, believed in the racial superiority of whites and in their absolute right to do as they saw fit with the inferior black race in their midst.

Nafisi said this about the book:

“It looks at how ordinary decent people, or outcasts like Huck and Pap, could abandon their hearts and take the easy road, embracing ugly thoughts and prejudices when they are sanctioned by society. Could such horrors as slavery or the Holocaust happen without the complicity and voluntary blindness of decent, ordinary people, those who go to church and volunteer for good works and yet can easily turn, as they do in Huck Finn, into a murderous mob? It might have been the question that gave Huck such a dramatic sense of urgency when I taught it in those violent revolutionary days in Iran”.

 

How can good people wreak such havoc on other more vulnerable good people? Is a $40 reward all it takes?

Yet the young students of Iran largely supported the rebellious position of Huck. They applauded his actions in refusing to return the slave to the master.

Even though they were good Muslims, they did not support the religious mob! I found that interesting.

Mark Twain and Spiritual Slavery

Classic Books, Freedom, racism, Truth Seeking, Uncategorized

 

Mark Twain had a deep aversion to slavery.  That was an unusual attitude at the time. In fact most people in the south of  the United States, and elsewhere for that matter, including many people in Canada, felt slavery was natural. That was just how things worked.  But Twain did not always feel that way. Like Huck Finn he grew into hatred of slavery, because he grew up with it and thought it was normal and therefore right. Only later in life did he realize that slavey was a sin and must be resisted.

Late in his life Twain said this:

“In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery.  I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind—and then the texts were read aloud to us the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing.”

This reminds me of an argument I had once had with a young lawyer. I don’t remember what we were arguing about, but it was an ethical argument about whether or not a particular action or activity was wrong. His ultimate position was that he had been brought up to believe that so he believed it. He was a slave to his parent’s opinions. He was not free.

Frankly, I was stunned that an educated person who had spent 7 years in a university could hold that was an answer to my argument. But really, he was just clearly enunciating a position held by many people in society. They implicitly believe what their parents believed and do not question the authority of the parent to control their beliefs even deep into maturity. This is what I call spiritual slavery.  When we are growing up we naturally believe what our parents tell us, but I believe when we are mature we have a duty to question what we have been  told us, even if we continue to respect the parents.  What Friedrich Nietzsche said about teachers and students is equally applicable to parents and children: “One repays a teacher badly by remaining always a pupil.” Would you want your children to believe as you believe just because you taught them to believe it? I think not. We want our children eventually to think for themselves. Perhaps even to teach us where we went wrong!

I would even hold this position if I were God. I would not want people to believe me only because I said something was true.  I would not give them a Holy book with prescriptions that must be followed. I would want them to think for themselves. Again, I would want them to teach me if I was wrong. I want people—all people—to be spiritually free!

Later in his life Twain realized what he had been taught by his elders was wrong. Slavery was wicked.  As Azar Nafisi said, “his childhood memories left such a mark on him that slavery became to his mind a universal symbol of man’s cruelty, stupidity, and depravity.” This is what I now think about racism. It too has been inculcated in us since the days of our youth by a system of systemic racism that we have not recognized, because we were like fish who don’t see the water in which they swim. At one time slavery was  like that. It is not like that anymore. But racism is still like that. And we must resist it.

If we are not free to think for ourselves we are not free.

 

 

Deep Freedom

Classic Books, Exploitation, Freedom, racism, Rebel, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a book about freedom.  It is about the freedom of young boys who are smothered by demands that they conform to narrow constraints of maiden aunts and Sunday schools. And that is important. Revolting from such constraints is the freedom Huck seeks. That is the freedom that Huck seeks and is willing to pay the ultimate price when he lights out for the territory. He wants it even if means hell.

 

But it also about freedom that a large portion of Americans didn’t enjoy, namely the indigenous and black people of America. The freedom extolled by Americans since the time of the Puritans that for some reason was not for them. Some of them in fact were enslaved—i.e., as unfree as they possibly could be in this land lauded as being the land of the free.  It was free only for some. Most them were white and most of them were men.

The novel is also about freeing humans like Huck from the ideas that enslave him. These are the ideas—like making humans into property—that Huck must learn to renounce. And it is hard to renounce ideas with which we have grown up.

How can anyone who believes in and relishes freedom as so many Americans and Canadians do, ever think that slavery is acceptable? Canadians have to remember that slavery was also prevalent in Canadian society. Canada was much more than the underground railway inviting in slaves to sanctuary.

When charlatans, murderers, and thieves join the “God-fearing” white folks of the community to chase down en mass Jim the runaway slave, Huck says, aptly, “It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.”

Mark Twain once said, “Lincoln’s proclamation…not only set the black slaves free, but set the white man free also.” I believe that is profoundly true.

This is beautifully materialized in the character of Jim the black slave. Jim frees Huck. In pursuing freedom for Jim, Huck is also freed from the chains of the Sunday school marms.

Friendship or Hell?

Books, Classic Books, Freedom, Morality, religion, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

I have come to the conclusion that Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is my favorite novel. It is the classic of classics. Why is that?  What makes it so great? I think it so great because explores, as no one else has done as well, the issue of freedom. Above all it explores the freedom to think for oneself. So many people extoll the virtues of freedom particularly in the US and Canada. But I find they mostly have a very shallow notion of what freedom is all about. Not so with Twain. He knew what ultimate freedom is all about.

The novel Huckleberry Finn challenges all authority. None are sacred. Particularly the sacred is not sacred. Freedom from authority is the real freedom.

Huck Finn’s journey with Jim down the Mississippi River was a journey towards knowledge. It was an education. Huck has to learn, and even more important, he has to unlearn. As Nafisi said, he was on a trip in which Huck is “countering the lessons of Sunday school.”

The novel challenges the morality of slavery, but it actually goes much farther than that. The trip to the dangerous south asks a more fundamental question: What can you do when your moral code lets you down?  That is what Huck wrestles with throughout the novel.

The central question Huck must deal with is how can he help his friend Jim by finding freedom when he “knows” that is wrong. In fact, Huck “knows” that is a sin to help a slave to freedom. That is what he learned in Sunday School and from Aunt Sally, Miss Watson, and the Widow Douglas.  But he must unlearn that. As Huck says, “I couldn’t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way.” When Huck is fighting with his conscience he comes across slave hunters and resolves to deliver Jim to them, because it is the right thing to do, but as hard as he tries to do the right thing he cannot give up his friend. He thinks he is not man enough to do what he “should” do.

When Huck has difficult decisions to make he always has “a long think.” That is a good practice. He thinks slowly and critically. But he thinks. As he says to himself, and of course, us, “The more I studied about this the more my conscience was grinding me, and the more wicked and lowdown and ornery I got to feeling.”  If he had gone to Sunday School as he should have, he would have learned that “people that acts as I’d been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire.” He even tries to pray but his “heart  wasn’t right.” Again he decides to do the “right thing” and give up Jim by writing to Miss Watson. As soon as he rights the letter he feels much better. His conscience is finally clear. He feels “good  and all washed clean of sin for the first time I even felt in my life and I knowed I could pray now.” But even then he continues to think and that is his undoing. He think too much and decides he will go against everything he has ever been taught. It is extremely difficult to do.

And then Huck considers the reality of Jim. He continues to think through the day after he wrote the letter to Miss Watson. In a remarkable statement that shows the power of genuine connection compared to the disrupted connection of a corrupt ideology, Huck says this:

“I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moon time, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow sometimes I couldn’t seem to strike no place to harden me against him, but only the other kind.  I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was; when I come back out of the fog; and when come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I truck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in then the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look  and see that paper [the letter he wrote to Miss Watson but had not yet sent, that would return Jim to slavery].

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling because I’d got to decide forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then I’ll go to hell—and tore it up.”

 

I think Twain is saying if you look at the real person, rather than the person you expect to see through the lens of your religion, or politics, or ideology then you can see the real person. Notice too how Huck and Jim have become “we.”  They are connected by a deep sense of fellow feeling. That is what real morality, and real art, and real religion are all about. They are not about ideology or dogma.

Has there ever been a greater friendship in all of literature than this? Has there ever been a greater friendship in the whole world than this?  Huck was prepared to do what he believed was wrong because that is what he was taught, and that is what everybody did, in order to save his friend, even though it meant going to hell?

That is what ultimate freedom is all about!

 

A Drill Sergeant in the cultural War

Culture Wars, Freedom, Human rights

 

John Oliver pointed out that some of some of the same players involved in another phony war, the war against ‘Critical race Theory’ (‘CRT’)  have volunteered for action in the current war by conservatives  against trans gender rights. This is  the latest battle and for the same reasons. Conservatives see an opportunity for advancement of personal agendas in a the phony war. Many of the participants in the CRT   battle were doing it as a wedge issue to promote school choice.

 

One of the main characters in the CRT skirmish has now joined the new trans war, namely Chris Rufo. He specifically said he was taking the same “reporting” he did with CRT to “gender ideology.” Rufo said he wanted to give parents “the media narrative, kind of justification, or validation or substantiation of their concerns.” Rufo was arming parents with arguments they could use in the cultural war…” to give them the language they can use to speak of it with confidence so that they can speak about it directly,  and they can speak about it with the requisite level of aggressiveness.” Rufo’s language makes it clear that he see himself as a drill sergeant in the culture war.

 Rufo claimed that the gender claims were all part of the “radical gender theory” and that combatants should start referring to the phrase “trans stripper” in lieu of “drag queen” because it has “a more lurid set of connotations and shifts the debate to sexualization.”

According to John Oliver,

“In the conservative playbook that tactic is a really big one–linking the discussion of gender identity sexual predation and teaches grooming students. A related tactic is arguing that the rise in numbers of children identifying as trans is due to social contagion. It is just a mass delusion, a trendy fad that is rapidly spreading among young people.”

 

The practitioners in the culture war that few things riles up their supporters more than sexual paranoia. Stoking fears about sexuality is a guarantee of conservative support. It is about as fool-proof as stoking fears about race.

Contrary to the typical position of conservatives in Canada and the US, historians are documenting the lives of transgender people through history. This is not something new. It is not a fad. As National Geographic, not exactly a left wing rag,  reported, “There’s ample evidence of gender variance throughout human history. As far back as historians have found evidence of transgender people, we have found transgender children.” This is not just a modern fad stoke by liberals.

 

Conservatives have claimed there has been a rapid rise in children identifying as trans, and that is a very common perception, but it is a misconception. As Julia Serano pointed out, when you look at a chart of left-handedness among Americans in the 20th century you see a huge spike when Americans stopped forcing children to write with their right hands. After that there was a plateau. That does not mean everyone suddenly became left-handed. It really just means that people were free to be whom they wanted to be. And isn’t that a wonderful thing?  Conservatives, again, claim to be in support of freedom when they are among the most relentless of foes against freedom. When people are free to choose, as they should be, a significant number of people chose to exercise that freedom and decided to change their gender. By far the most do not!

The only thing spreading like wild fire is hysteria.