I’m perusing the various posts all over the net about books that have been banned by some community in the United States over the last year.
Some of them are quite ridiculous. Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickle and Dimed” is actually a good book. She actually put rubber to the road and found out how hard it is to make a living and detailed it in this book. Why someone would ban this is had for me to wrap my head around.
Other books were Huxley’s “Brave New World”, or Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye.”
Looking back I still recall all the books I read when I was in high school. Yes, we had to READ. Our first year they gave us a huge bag of books and among them was Brave New World, Black Like Me, and other of what I’d proudly call subversive books. And then through my four years at that school we read the Greek tragedies, the Canterbury Tales, all good stuff. Even read the entire Bible one year and discussed and dissected it.
To me books have three purposes:
1) To educate
2) To entertain
3) To expand consciousness.
Of course may books can cover all three of those purposes, or combinations thereof.
To ban some of the classics is ludicrous to me.
And that leads me to the dangers of banning things. Look at the HPV vaccine. I’m of the firm opinion that EVERY child be they male or female be vaccinated for this. And it’s looking increasingly likely that a vaccine for HIV is in the works. That too.
But the fundamentalist bigots don’t want this because they believe we should pay for the ‘sin’ of sex. To them I say, when it is you son or daughter, do you really want to take the chance of a decrease lifespan because of your refusal to vaccinate them against those killers?
It’s the same mind set behind banning books. Many do it for reasons formed of their religious beliefs, while some do it from blissful ignorance. I mean come on, Ehrenreich’s book?
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