A Texas school found the most horrifying way to use public domain Winnie-the-Pooh.
When I saw the trailer for Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, I thought we’d reached the nadir of public domain-enabled re-imaginings, but it turns out, it can get much, much more horrifying than a low-budget slasher. Like a picture book in which the beloved bear must face a school shooter. Seriously.
A Dallas elementary school send students home with a picture book called Stay Safe: Run, Hide, Fight, in which Winnie the Pooh and his friends are confronted with the unimaginable—yet horribly familiar, and advise children to “run / hide / fight” until the police arrive. The book (which was published by the security firm Praetorian Consulting) doesn’t appear to offer advice on exactly how a tiny child should fight off an adult armed with an assault rife, but it does include an illustration of Kanga and Roo in boxing gloves. Cute!
Especially galling was the timing: Students received the book the same week as the one-year anniversary of the Uvalde massacre, in which nineteen children and two adults were murdered, and during which the police did not, as the book promises, “come fast to catch the stranger.” Stay Safe was distributed to students as young as pre-Kindergarten, with no instructions to their parents as to how to explain why Texas won’t pass any gun laws to keep this shit from happening.
[via The Guardian]
