It’s that week of the year where we celebrate the freedom to read and think. It’s easy to say that I don’t get it when people challenge books and object to them for not only their child, but for the children of their school district, city, or state, every year I take a moment to reflect and admit: I actually do understand. My childhood was spent with people who controlled what I read — in an effort to control what I thought, what I heard and saw and felt. I know it was a well-intentioned effort, and even now I observe my younger siblings being raised a different way. While I have no children of my own, I love my siblings, niece and nephewlets to bits, and understand what it’s like to want to control the world they inhabit. You only want good things for them. You want to keep out the bad.
Parents who ban and challenge books, I get it. I really do understand.
Bad things happen. You could point to any story in the news this week, and say for sure that bad things do happen. It’s so easy to want to close our eyes and make the bad things disappear. And even better, if we can close our kids’ eyes, and their classmates eyes, and the eyes of all the kids our kids might come to know in the district. It would be so much easier to teach our kids just what we wanted them to know about certain things if we were the only ones talking to them. If they didn’t hear about it from a kid who’d read Twilight or from Lauren Myracle’s new book, Love Ya Bunches, or from John Green or Laurie Halse Anderson or Ellen Hopkins or Alex Sanchez…
I understand you, Challenging Parents, too well, because I was well tutored in fear, and how it makes you want to control everything. Worse than that, it makes kids who feel fearful and out of control just being out in the world. They want to find the rules and follow them, and never deviate. They want to be right at the cost of being spontaneous or thoughtful or open or forgiving or inventive. But perfection is a fallacy and control an illusion: we walk through this world at constant risk of falling.
And that’s okay. Some of us have faith to hold us up, which is no small, insignificant thing. Others of us have reason and routine and target practice and music — whatever helps us make it through. It’s okay for us to acknowledge the fear and the hopes for future of your children, and to spend time praying and hoping and wishing for the world to treat them better.
As long as we’re not lying to ourselves. As long as we don’t think that censoring books about rape will safeguard a kid against ever being forced. As long as we don’t think that whiting out swear words will mean no one ever says them, or that keeping boys about gay kids in a confined collection will mean that there will be no one else born gay. As long as we don’t fool ourselves into believing that keeping a book away from a child means keeping information from existence.
Eden’s gate or Pandora’s Box was opened ages ago, and the troubles of the world are out there. In this battle, knowledge is power. I would rather send my younger sibs out knowing everything they can know, and how to ask about what they don’t; wouldn’t you prefer that for your kids? Books are weapons, in that they hold the battle plans of someone else who has been this way before. Don’t give in to the fear and try to keep the world at bay by hiding it. Read with your kids. Talk to them. Send them out armed. Pass them a book.
the best part of my childhood was discovering all the books i read from the library. 😉
paz
"Books are weapons, in that they hold the battle plans of someone else who has been this way before"
I've never thought of it quite that way before. Thanks.