Welcome
It's my pleasure to present Stories and Songs for Us. Animal Rights Counterculture and these works are the result of countless frustrating incidents like hearing a group of children singing Three Blind Mice or Alouette. Or hearing a mother read the likes of Little Red Riding Hood or The Three Little Pigs to their kiddies. Or simply kicking back to read a mindless novel only to discover that the couple goes out to a "romantic" steak dinner. Each time, I would say to myself "Boy, if only there was stuff for us."
Well, this kind of stuff is out there, but it is hard to find. And overshadowed by the other, more irritating stuff. So I came to the conclusion that the only way out was to make more of our stuff.
Some of the material here is geared towards adults and teens who just want to kick back and read something entertaining but not too heavy. Other songs and stories are geared toward young children.
A word about young children: I feel we owe it to ourselves to replace a lot of the existing, often violent, usually arbitrary fairy tales, songs and nursery rhymes with more meaningful versions. I've made an attempt at this with an updated version of Little Red Riding Hood which I've embedded in a more grown-up story: Two Unruly Children. The old version of Little Red Riding Hood is hereby abolished as of today.
Since stories like Little Red Riding Hood are in the public domain, the only way that we can compete is to unleash our stuff for the free use of others. However, we must retain our author's rights to prevent unwanted tampering. That is the sole purpose of the usage restrictions reflected in the introductory copyright message. Aside from this, we freely encourage people to take these and other such stories, copy them freely, illustrate them abundantly; in short, pass it on!
In my own works (as opposed to other submissions on this site), I am not pretending to break any new literary or musical ground with these works. Some of the plots are shamelessly clich?. However, I do hope you'll find this stuff at least mildly entertaining.
Please follow suit and start making your own stuff and unleashing it. I don't care if you say that you don't have literary or musical talent: everyone does to a certain extent. Just be yourself and approach things with a pure, unpretentious heart. The stakes are too high for you not to try. We've got to replace all the aberrant, arbitrary stuff with more meaningful, loving stuff as soon as possible. This is an extremely important cause. Only by staying sane ourselves and getting the kiddies while they're young can we try to limit the damage and eventually reverse it.
Mohan Embar President, Animal Rights Counterculture Wisconsin, U.S.A.