Sussing Out Snuffy

🎶 Sunny days, Chasing the clouds away… 🎶

The Turd Reich has killed Big Bird. Is there any way to chase these clouds away?

Can you all spot the Snuffleupagus in the room? The re-THUG-licans and the puppet masters of Project 2025 don’t seem to want children to have whimsy or magic or education or culture in their lives. Especially not POOR children, or RURAL children, or IMMIGRANT children, or ANY children who would tend to watch Sesame Street.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has supported and distributed enrichment programming for all people across all walks of life in the United States since 1967. They didn’t discriminate or judge. They didn’t build barriers of exclusion. They embraced all.

Perhaps that was the problem. CPB’s brand of open-minded inclusivity and acceptance is anathema to self-righteous bigots and zealous ideologues. They cannot FATHOM, nor ABIDE such non-critical acceptance — it goes against every deeply held, carefully indoctrinated idea and practice of xenophobic hatred that are the foundation for their identities.

Appreciating diversity has never been a strength of the religious reich. Speaking as one who has always appreciated variety, and the spice it adds to life, I find homogeneity and conformity viscerally disturbing. More than that, I fundamentally cannot understand the instincts to lock everything down and button everything up and treat deviation from the strictly controlled and carefully contrived path as a capitol offense.

Imagine trying to cage the wind.

Yet there are legions of people in this country who are so threatened by individuality and otherness that they simply cannot abide it existing. Thus they seek to cage and control, and ideally eradicate it altogether.

There are legions of people in this country so afraid of anything that is NOT exactly the same as everything they have always known that they would give up their own ability to choose ANYTHING simply to be surrounded by sameness. Everywhere. Always. And never have to be burdened by thought. Ever.

When everyone ACTS the same and LOOKS the same and BEHAVES the same everywhere at all times no one ever has to evaluate anything for themselves and they never have to risk making the wrong choice and accepting the consequences of their own actions.

All issues that the residents of Sesame Street have been gently but firmly teaching children to navigate safely for DECADES. Sesame Street taught children how to navigate encounters with the unfamiliar. Sesame Street and other CPB-sponsored shows (Dora The Explorer, Reading Rainbow, Bill Nye the Science Guy) encouraged inquisitive instincts, taught children how to question and explore the world around them.

Sesame Street taught children how to embrace change, and how to seek and pursue MORE. It taught children that it was OK to imagine, that they could BE whatever they wanted to be.

All very dangerous ideas to plant in the impressionable young minds of those who were bred to perpetuate the hate and the homogeny, bred to step right in line, to keep and preserve the restrictive ideals of the conservative groupthink.

THIS, at its essence is why the self-appointed guardians of traditional values would viciously target and destroy the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with extreme prejudice. They didn’t want the minds of their children opened to possibilities. They didn’t want their children to learn to question or to think. They don’t want their children to imagine there might be any other way to live their lives.

Imagination is dangerous to the status quo. Imagination has the possibility to change the world. That cannot be allowed.

What if, for instance, the youngest and most influenceable minds imagined a world ruled by KINDNESS. What if they imagined a world of built upon JOY and COLLABORATION. What if they imagined new friends might have new experiences to share with them and new things to teach them? What if children never stopped asking “Why?”, and what if they weren’t afraid of the answers?

What if the children weren’t afraid of change? What if they grew into adults capable of embracing change?

Thoughts like these keep conservative authoritarians up nights. They cannot allow a generation who questions, imagines, and isn’t afraid of change.

These are all lessons that can be learned from Sesame Street.

That’s why Big Bird had to die. That’s why they snuffed out Snuffleupagus. Silenced Burt and Earnie. Trashed Oscar the Grouch.

Sesame Street was an existential threat to the authoritarian gestalt. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was an affront to the rigid (and, dare I say, offensively delicate) sensibilities of the Far Right. They have been unsuccessfully attacking these institutions for decades.

Only under the current “might is right” chaotic upheaval of the new Fascist Regime have they succeeded.1 These and many others are clearly the actions of people who neither got enough hugs as children nor have any capacity to imagine the benefits that come from differing perspectives.

Our country, and in many ways the WORLD, is being violently regressed to a fantastical (or is it fanatical?) model of a society that never really existed in truth. We are all being forced to step in line, to conform to a few lunatic’s ideals of how the world is supposed to work.

This is not the first time such a scheme has been plotted or executed. The grandparents or great grandparents of the very architects of this new reality (where Sesame Street has become a picture of devastation not unlike Gaza) bravely fought AGAINST this same “Enforce my rigid world-view upon others” mentality in Hitler’s Germany.

It seems the power brokers of this generation have lost track of their own histories. It’s a shame they have so thoroughly undermined the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Public Broadcasting Service, as CPB helped support and PBS in turn broadcasts and streams dozens of documentaries that can assist in presenting the history of how the USA collaborated with Europe and fought to free the world from the tyranny of fascism.

Perhaps that too is why the Corporation for Public Broadcasting had to be destroyed. Perhaps the lessons of history are too problematic, run too clearly contrary to the ideals Neuvo Fascists wish to cling to.

There is much public speculation that Trump recently pressured the Smithsonian museum to remove any reference to his TWO IMPEACHMENTS from their Impeachment exhibition2, effectively rewriting history. Similarly, the architects of Project 2025 dare not look back at where we, and they, came from in truth. It is easier and less disruptive to all in the current regime to rewrite history to suit their narrative and eliminate anyone willing to disseminate historical facts.

The authoritarians wish to keep their false narrative alive, so that they have an idealized “better time” to strive towards. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the many member stations of the Public Broadcasting Service have consistently offered programming that has the potential to challenge that narrative with inconvenient facts. Content that educates and informs. Content that opens hearts and broadens minds. Thus, they had to go.

What will we do without the excellent programs the Corporation for Public Broadcasting helped make possible? What will this post-Sesame Street world look like?

It won’t be sunny days, that’s for damn sure.