An article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was about how banning books has become popular. For me, as both an author, reader and citizen, this is frightening, infuriating and frustrating.
An English teacher I had in high school told us about an incident in Arizona. It seems there were new literature books with selections from various time periods. A parent came to the school board decrying a story in which a knight put on his girdle and demanded the books be discarded.
Knights? Remember about the Dark Ages, Medieval Europe? Or maybe you don’t as so much of history seems skipped now.
At that time girdle was the name for a belt. It had nothing to do with women’s undergarments. What this parent was saying was that they were ignorant and wanted to punish everyone rather than learn something about how vocabulary changes over time.
How many other books are on the banned lists because vocabulary used in them is not today’s accepted form? Or attitudes? Use these as lessons in how we’ve changed, hopefully for the better.
Another book was a graphic novel about the Holocaust. A graphic novel is not a comic book although some are very close. This one is not.
I read a graphic novel “They Called Us Enemy” by George Takai. It was about the Japanese internment camps of World War II, camps ignored by history, denied by the government and educators. He had an interesting comment: We need to learn both the good and the bad in our history. The first makes us proud. The second is a way to do better, not repeat our mistakes.
Banning books is popular with dictators as a way to stifle thinking, knowledge, different viewpoints. Is that what we want here?
There are many books I choose not to read. Horror, romance and violent thrillers are among them. But I do not think I have the right to forbid those who like these genres to read them. And, yes, I’ve read a book or two in these genres before deciding to avoid them.
That is a most frustrating point about the present book banning. Most of these people have never read the books they want to ban. They heard about them on social media from some entity who may or may not be who they say they are.
We have many problems in our country. I choose not to write about them or politics or religion. But banning books thereby shutting off other viewpoints, facts we may not like, is not the way to solve those problems.
Problems are solved by getting them out in the open and listening, really listening, to each other. Respect is a two way street. And no one is always right about everything.
