I think a lot of people have been surprised at how quickly the Trump regime has gone from a clown-show to a full-blown fascist regime. A lot of people supported him and his views and ideals, it’s true, but many never took him seriously enough. Too caught up in their own lives and escapes to realize what is happening.
That’s where the whole ‘privilege’ we hear about comes in.
The whole – it’s not happening to me, so, well, sorry.
We are all at risk and jeopardy because the Trump regime is proving over and over that it listens to money and to the powerful, and that’s it.
It shouldn’t take mass deportations, cutting of services, curtailing of rights, and the abuse of a bully-pulpit to make anyone who questions things a villain, but here we are.
With the Right emboldened and wielding a self-serving version of Christianity (do as I say, not as I do), we are now seeing book and media bans pushed and enacted.
It doesn’t matter that I am an author, literature shouldn’t be banned unless there is something diabolically dangerous about it – and even then there needs to be an explanation (thinking about the famous cookbook for anarchists here). I may loathe hate speech and books that tout it, but it deserves to exist as much as literature about LGBTQIA+ issues. We are not being “mothered”, we are being “pastored” in that we are being told what we can and cannot consume and read and why the things they are taking away are wrong and sinful.
SHAME!
SHAME!
How dare you like that thing.
This is a very, very slippery slope and once you see the fringe stuff that’s out there, you begin to understand that you’re often taking the side of monsters to protect their right to say horrible things. The thing is, though, that if we start cherry-picking who we will protect and who we will ban, it gets very messy, and that line begins to push back, back, back to us.
I write horror, seen by many as vulgar and disgusting, as far as the genre goes. Should it be banned?
What if a child gets hold of It?
What if a naive kid gets their hands on some work by de Sade?
What if a young person reads a book about a trans character and questions their own identity?
BAN THEM ALL!
We have already seen books banned for cartoonish reasons as the Christian Right wrings its hands and demands God and the Bible be put into the schools. Never mind the abuse, terror, murder, and so on that’s in that book, but that’s different.
Kids SHOULD be afraid of the end of the world and rejoice at the water turning to blood and demons being loosed on earth.
It’s fine!
It gets tiresome being lectured on FREE SPEECH as it’s being stripped away. As it’s said, they want the freedom to be racist, homophobic, and xenophobic, that’s what they want.
“Just to speak plain,”
There are resources out there to help combat the banning of books.
Here are a few.
Book Banning Resources – How you can fight back against bans.
Digital Public Library of America
The Internet Archive – free movies, music, books, programs, and more.
Comic Book Legal Defense Fund – read banned comics.
There are more, but that’s a good place to start.
It’s up to YOU to know what you’re kids are reading and up to YOU to decide what YOU are reading.
Schools used to be a place to challenge us, to enrich us, and to teach us, but now they are simply testing facilities and daycare. It’s up to us to carry this torch.
Support authors, national, regional, and local.
Support true free speech – meaning the ability to say things but not the ability to avoid consequences of inciting words.
And curate your own recommendations with friends, family, and the world.
Me, I always recommend His Dark Materials because it’s a wonderful adventure with challenging themes and ideas. Books help us dream, help us see things we may never see otherwise, and help us to learn to empathize with people we may never meet. Books are made from the wood of the Tree of Life, and some would ban them because they are afraid of what we may learn about the world and about ourselves. They want to control what we think and feel so they can better keep us in check. It’s about control.
We don’t have to ascribe to or like the things others say. We don’t have to read what they write. We can teach the ignorance of what people put into the world.
They have the right to put it out there though (again, unless it’s actively dangerous).
They can do a lot of things but they can never ban free thought.
…c…
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 