As noted by Kelly Scott Franklin, a professor of English literature at Hillsdale College and a scholar of Whitman,
“What this new movement of censorship really wants is to do away with the very act and process of education, because education is complicated and it’s hard work. It requires a lot of sifting to find beauty, truth, and goodness,” he said. “It requires compassion and a willingness to try to see the world as others did in their time and place. It requires acts of magnanimity toward flawed and wounded human beings, even if we disagree, and even if they’re in grave error. Those activities are hard–in the classroom and in everyday life. So it’s much simpler just to silence, cancel, and destroy.”
San Francisco, where it’s just easier to walk around the bodies on the sidewalk than to do anything about it pic.twitter.com/hVFfdIhNg5
— Beth Odonnell (@BethOdo_SF) July 20, 2021