Continued Confessions

an abbreviated version

So it’s Thursday, and I have committed to posting twice a week. But as I said in the beginning of my Substack life, I really don’t like being told what to do. And today I ended up using most of the day researching why I seem to be on the other side of the Nazi issue from some of the writers I admire. So now it’s past my sell-by date timewise, and this post will be necessarily short.

Suffice it to say that I don’t like censorship. And I answered someone by saying that all I can think of is the slippery slope. While I obviously find Nazi proselytizers abhorrent (you know that I was born in London in 1945, don’t you?), I get a chill of book banning in the brouhaha about their purported presence here. There are plenty of people writing on here with whom I don’t agree—see Ann Coulter, for instance—but I don’t have to read their posts. Now I must confess that I haven’t found any specific sites that call for joining a Nazi party or waging war on the country, but there may well be some people who write on here who have very extreme views about issues on which we disagree. I am a militant feminist when it comes to bodily autonomy which we used to call abortion rights, but I adore men in general and one in particular right now. I suspect there may be some right-to-lifers writing on here, but I don’t care to waste any more time finding out who believes what. The freedom to write what we want on our own Substack is what attracted many of us to this platform. Someone mentioned that he had self-censored a post on one of the hot political issues because he didn’t want to stir up more hatred. The only thought which causes me to self-censor occasionally is the knowledge that my daughter may read it or some of my friends may take offense to something. But even then, I believe I could work things out with them in person if the written word had seemed harsher than intended.

A final note about my darling Mum, who obviously lived through WWII and was in the thick of the bombing while having two of us babies. Many years later after we had been in Canada and then the States, Mum went to visit England on her own. She purposely chose a German liner to travel on so that she could rid herself of the remnants of Nazi hatred associated with that country. I’m sorry to say that I was too self-involved and never took the time to ask her how she felt on that voyage. I hope it was restorative, Mummy.