Free Canuckistan! was started by a supporter of my campaign against Canada’s “human rights” commissions but has since broadened its range of targets. I was struck by this post: “Sesame Street — Ultimate Evil?“

I consider the de-monsterization of monsters to be a disservice to the truth of things, and the moral and imaginative education of children. You know, editing all the scary bits out of stories and nursery rhymes, and replacing it with “Happy The Bunny Goes Recycling.”
Cookie Monster? Messy eater. Grover? Groveller. Harry? A bit irritable… When adults refuse to deal with scary stuff in age-appropriate ways for fear of ‘traumatizing’ their kids, they send the message that this is so horrible, even adults are scared and powerless to handle it. Better to re-write all the stories, only with nice characters and happy endings. Except– not everybody is nice, nor are all endings– or middlings and beginnings– necessarily happy.
The world– while shot through with wonder and glory– is also full of sorrow, darkness, and evil. And even monsters. Some of them have names, and torment people or nations; some have died, but their works and effects live on; some are in our midst, and we want to imagine they are nice, even when that’s not true… The To refuse to recognize monsters is not to improve the world, but to partially blind ourselves, and misunderstand human nature, and to be at a loss when confronted with evil.

Which may partially explain Obama’s Sesame Street foreign policy with Ahmadinejad as the Cookie Monster.

On the more general point, I’m not sure you can raise generation after generation on the “Happy The Bunny Goes Recycling” pablum and still expect to have fully-functioning adults. Personally, I shall always be grateful to my kids for deciding, around the age of 18 months, that Barney was a crashing bore.