Don't Kill "To Kill a Mockingbird"

Cultures die as new ones are born. Fads ripple across our history in a manner of decades. Moments come with impact and slowly drift out of reality. The only way to touch what it was is if they are preserved somehow.

What would happen if we all focused on this moment, right now? Sometimes we are told to do that. To do the right thing now and not worry about its effects tomorrow. Sometimes that is a good point.

But what would that mean? 

It could and often is dangerous. And has gotten many a people in trouble. 

We live in now. We don’t need to focus on it any more than to know that what we are doing is the right thing. But the past affects our every step- we may consciously think “this has happened before… if I do what I did last time I will end up where I did last time.” Or maybe

we subconsciously take the next step in one direction because some innate sense is telling us the other way has hurt us before. What we do also effects the next moment. The entire reason we take the next step. If the next decision you make doesn’t affect the next moment you live… where are you living? The eighty-second dimension? So in reality, 'livinig in the moment' does not even exist.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” brings us our past. It shows who America is, whether or not we want that past to have affected us. Because the fact is, the past does affect us. Not to mention we live in the ‘modern’ time.  I’m not saying we do not need to know what is going on, but that comes with living here. We know what is going on. I don't personally need a modern book for that. I can just read the news. We don’t live in the 1930s through the depression, we can only read about it.

In "To Kill a Mockingbird" we follow one of the most loveable and blunt characters of all time- six to eight year old Scout. To me, at least, she is an example of "becoming as a little child" and trust. Though she is careful with how she takes the world, she trusts those that are deserving of her trust. Like Mr. Dolphus Raymond says about Dill when he comes out of a courthouse crying because of the unfairness, "Things haven't caught up with that one's instinct yet. … Cry about the [crap] white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they're people, too." In this book, Harper Lee is able to touch our child side like no other book I have ever read.

 

Another wonderful thing about "To Kill a Mockingbird" is how we are traveling with Scout to make connections and learn things as she would. For example, one of the central themes of the book is 'to walk in another's shoes'. Scout shows us this with both Mayella and Boo Radley.

I can't imagine this not being part of school curriculum. It is a classic that has allowed so many to connect with each other- even to the older folks that also read it in high school.