Ban the Books, you say?

 

Love Arrives

“…Love arrives

and in its train come ecstasies

old memories of pleasure

ancient histories of pain.

Yet if we are bold,

love strikes away the chains of fear

from our souls…”

Maya Angelou

          All this talk of banning books has made me want to go back and read everything on the “banned” list. I’ll be honest with you; I don’t get it. We won’t even ban semi-automatic weapons, but we’ll ban literature—because it offends us? Really? I have been a life-long reader and I can tell you, no book has defiled me or led me astray. I managed to do that all by myself.

          What, exactly, are we afraid of? Our children don’t care about any of the stuff adults are obsessed with—race and gender differences. They don’t have the generations of prejudice and ignorance that we and our parents do—at least that can be said of the children I know, even right here in backward-looking Alabama. Children aren’t afraid of their classmates who happen to be different from them—that’s normal, desirable, and as it should be. Most young children don’t even register whether someone is black or brown or white, or what gender they are.

          When I first came to Alabama in 1980, the Eagle Forum was holding forth about this same list of books being in school libraries—speechifying and threatening folks. They wanted such classics as Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye banned. Reminds me of the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradley about burning all the books. I guess the idea is to keep us from confronting our history, and from educating ourselves about truth and reality. Is that what we really want?

I think of Rodney King here: “Why can’t we all just get along?” Good question. Why on earth do we waste our time and energy trying to eliminate all the things that scare us, instead of working on ourselves to eliminate our fear? Banning books is not the answer.

          As Maya Angelou says, the answer is love. When love arrives “it strikes away the chains of fear.” Banning books is a closed-heart activity; it narrows down the space for love and acceptance. And there are so many books…wonderful books. Are the censors going to read every book in the school libraries in Texas and then decide which ones are dangerous and offensive. Let me suggest they start with the Holy Bible which teaches us all about hypocrites and fear mongers. It’s a dangerous, seditious tome that may have unexpected consequences.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane