Margaret's Column

Okay, enough of that.

In the past decades, the followings books have been ‘challenged’ for removal from libraries and school reading lists:

This is only a partial list.

When I was in school, I remember seeing several copies of The Ox-bow Incident, I know Why the Caged Bird Sings’, and Huckleberry Finn in the school library. To my knowledge, no one ever complained about them, let alone actually try to get removed. I suppose Los Angeles in the late seventies and early eighties was more enlightened.

Why would anyone want to ban these books? We've all heard the excuses. Harry Potter promotes Satanism. Huckleberry Finn 'has that word' in it. Judy Blume encourages kids to sleep around. All of these reasons are smoke screens. The real truth is, these books don't present easy answers to a complicated world. They raise unpleasant questions and uncomfortable issues like mob violence, the deaths of parents and/or friends, the messy terrain of love and sex. (And how adults can and do abuse both). In other words, these, and other books, get kids to thinking. And that's too damn frightening for many adults. (Including the Vice-presidential nominee for a major political party. Fortunately, she never managed to get anything banned. But what does that say about this country?)

Book banning (or the attempt) says so much about people, and none of it is good. When you try to ban a book, any book, you’re announcing to the world that you are muddle-headed, intolerant, and afraid. It says ‘I’m so insecure in my own beliefs that I must smother any competing ideas.’ and ‘I’m terrified that my kids might actually become educated, and thus get out of my control’ and ‘Hey, think I’ll try to control everyone’s kids while I’m at it’.

I understand that people are afraid; things are moving too fast. We’re all trying to make sense out of a world that’s more and more chaotic. Of course there’s a tendency to close ranks, circle the wagons, raise the drawbridge, etc. None of this is effective. The only way to deal with the world is to meet it head-on. Nobody ever made the world an easier place to live in by banning books. In fact, you’re liable to make it worse. (Nazi Germany, anyone?)

There’s also the problem of Forbidden Fruit. No doubt many ‘Christian’ children, denied the wonders of Harry Potter at home, read the books at school, or at the houses of friends. In the early sixties, my mother got hold of a contraband copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, which was still banned in this country. She said the social commentary was interesting, but the ‘racy stuff’ that got the book banned was disappointingly tame.

An educated populace is a free populace, able to think on their feet, better equipped to handle a world that’s going to get messier before it doesn’t.  Just read the headlines. Climate change, economic stress, terrorisms, etc, aren't going away any time soon. Overly-sheltered little drones, who never learned how to think for themselves, will never be able to cope with that.

So, the next time anyone tries to ban something from your local school or public library, fight back. Protest. Name-call if you must (no one likes being called a Nazi). This is not a time to sit back and let things ‘sort themselves out’; they won’t.