Indeed. To the degree that Dr Seuss' books had a sociopolitical moral, whether or not I picked up on it depended how old I was when I (re)read it and what i was

Indeed. To the degree that Dr Seuss' books had a sociopolitical moral, whether or not I picked up on it depended how old I was when I (re)read it and what i was aware of in the world at the time. I picked up on the environmental message in the Lorax the first time through. But then again, "Save the envrionment, kids!" was very much a part of the zeitgeist from the late 80s into the mid-late 90s. The anti-discrimination message of the Sneetches on Beaches didn't hit me until I was old enough to realize that having different skin color was an intrinsic thing that people cared about only if they wanted to be meanies, and not simply people who'd gotten more sun tanning time than me.