Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Snow White and the seven vertically challenged men

We really toyed with writing a story about how Canadians are being taught how to shovel snow. Yes, you read that correctly. One would think that Canadians would know all about snow, but apparently that's not the case. And yet, one story climbed over the top of the mound of fresh powder and snapped our attention. Quite possibly, this is because we remember a book written some years ago as a humorous update to many fairy tales of old.

It may be time to revive the printing of said book, as it seems that large numbers of parents are abandoning reading and telling fairy tales to their children. While some parents are citing that the stories could be scary for little ones, a large number are refusing to keep the stories alive for a different reason.

It's because they aren't politically correct.

Well, heck, we knew all along that the stories weren't PC. But that isn't going to stop us from relating them to our kids when we have them. Heck no. If anything, these stories almost need to be told because they help gain an understanding of the time they were written in. Especially for many of these tales, that have been used for centuries to help relay messages to children, and to help fuel imaginations. But, for some parents (probably raised on these very same fairy tales, mind you), the stories just shouldn't be, because of the potentially harmful terms used in the stories.

In many ways, this would be like going back to classic movies and removing scenes because of the fact that they also aren't PC. And what really is PC, these days? After all, don't the terms change every couple of years, because of a change in sensitivities around the words? Some phrases that weren't acceptable a mere ten years ago have been made acceptable once again. In fact, to stay on the cutting edge of what is and what isn't politically correct, you'd have to have some sort of lens into the future.

Besides, we're fairly certain that "Goldilocks and the Three Ursine Americans" just won't have the same ring.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You have to express more your opinion to attract more readers, because just a video or plain text without any personal approach is not that valuable. But it is just form my point of view

Anonymous said...

I didn't understand the concluding part of your article, could you please explain it more?