Dr. Seuss' books are bright and colourful. They are great fun to read and perfect for kids, with their rhymes and pace. Even though Dr. Seuss' books are mainly aimed at children, there are lessons in some of them that everyone, including adults, could benefit from.

My favourite lesson of these is from the book "The Sneetches", which is all about discrimination. In the book, there are star-bellied sneetches, and sneetches with no stars on their bellies. The sneeches with stars always discriminate against the sneeches with no stars and feel that they are superior to them and better in every way, just because they have stars. Someone called Sylvester McMonkey McBean comes to the town and has a machine that allows the plain sneetches to go through it and come out with a star. The sneetches with stars on them don't like this at all. Then Sylvester McMonkey McBean makes a machine that takes stars off. So all the sneetches that had stars, now don't, and all the sneetches that were plain, now have stars, so they can tell the difference.

Things get out of hand when the sneetches keep going through these machines until none of them can tell which sneetch had a star to begin with and which one didn't. They do this until they are all poor and Sylvester McMonkey McBean leaves town. At the end of it, they realise that sneetches with stars are no different to sneetches without stars and they they are all equal. They start to get along and become friends.

This book was inspired by Dr. Seuss' opposition to antisemitism, but can be applied to anything I think. Just because some sneetches had stars, doesn't mean they were better than the ones without. Just because some people have a certain religion, skin colour, gender or sexual orientation doesn't mean that they are better or worse than others. All sneetches are equal!

Those who matter don't mind, and those who mind don't matter