Think for Yourself

To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor’s prohibited list.  ~John Aikin

Banned Book Week just ended yesterday, and today there is a notice in a North Carolina paper about a church that wants to burn all other versions of the Bible except for the King James version and "evil" books by Billy Graham, etc., to cleanse the world of "satanic literature."  I don't know whether to cry, scream, or sit down and just put my head in my hands and give up.

Censorship of books, wherever it happens, is wrong.  If you don't want to read it, leave it alone.  If you don't want your children to read it, teach them your beliefs and trust that they will leave it alone, too.  Don't presume, however, that you have the right to tell somebody ELSE how to think about things.  There is danger in that.  That's how dictatorships get started.  That's how dystopian literature becomes reality.

Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, said, "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."  I think that those who seek power for the sake of power, those 1984-esque  people who are not mere myth or paranoid fantasy, know this.  Whether they are wearing the mask of religious fervor or political righteousness, the people who take away the first book are setting a precedent, knocking over the first domino that will allow the others to go, too. 

Maybe you don't personally care about that first book.  Maybe you don't know anything about it.  Maybe you do, but you don't like to look at it.  Maybe it blatantly offends you, in fact.  Be careful, though.  Once somebody has been able to reach out their hand and take away that book because "it offends," something you hold dear might come under fire next.  It's a very slippery slope when value judgments are made on the basis of something so subjective.


I'm not saying there are no lines and no limits ever.  I don't think that your freedom should ever be taken at the cost of someone else.  Things like child pornography and the language of hate are always harmful to others.  I know there are those who disagree with this and say there should be no regulation at all, but I can't believe that the original ideas of free speech included a protection for things that damage others, use them and make them less than human.  


Therein lies the distinction between the books that people are trying to ban and these other things to me.  The literature is trying very much to explore what humanity is, dig down through the layers of this life, this world, this condition of being alive, even the bits that are not pleasant.  Perhaps especially the bits that aren't pleasant.  Some of the literature that people have tried to ban most frequently takes hold of some of life's toughest situations and looks them directly in their blood-shot eyes, tries to explain them honestly, tries to force people to look at the ugliness and brutality that all-too-frequently creeps into every life despite the most careful steps taken in prevention.

I think that is why those who want to ban these hate them so much.  It makes them face realities they want to hide, makes them realize that not all the gated communities in the world can keep pain away forever.  These books are the anti-TV, the anti-pop music.  "Books can be dangerous.  The best ones should be labeled 'This could change your life,'"  said Helen Exley.  Change is always hard.  We're creatures of inertia, comfortable in our little ruts.  Let's hope we can find a way to be less fearful of alternate ideas, though, before we wake up and find that they have all slipped through our fingers when we weren't paying attention.