Tie o' the Day

I got only half-dressed today, but I think I’m looking fine. You can’t go wrong with Grinch pajama bottoms and what I call my book-writing Tie o’ the Day. I’m wearing my cow Sloggers boots because my feet are cold. Anyhoo…

I’m riled and snarky about this attempt to ban books in Delta. I will be both serious and sarcastic in this post, I’m sure. First, let me be clear about a few things. I do think that some books are not age-appropriate for high schoolers and should not be available in a high school library. In fact, I think there are books which have no place in any library—for example, books whose sole aim is to be pornographic. They certainly do not belong on any school library shelf. Personally, I would prefer those books didn’t exist at all. But I live in the United States of America, where I have the right and responsibility to respect other people’s reading rights—whether or not I agree with their choices in reading material.

With the internet giving us the ability to download books to our phones and computers in less than a second, we have to be honest about how difficult it is to actually ban a book. If you think removing a “bad” book from the library is exiling it to the garbage dump, you are sorely mistaken. I can guarantee you the best way to get a high school student to read a specific book is to ban it from the shelves of the library. I can also guarantee you that the borrowing and online buying of the books mentioned in the The Chronicle article about someone wanting to pull books from the DHS library’s shelves caused many Millard County people of all ages to borrow, download, or order online Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, just to see what all the hub-bub is about. For that unintended consequence that all you book-banning advocates make happen, I thank you. Over the years, you Book Busybodies have caused millions of people to read incredible and majestic books they never would have thought to read without your efforts to get those books off the shelves of school/public libraries. Like I said, I thank the Book Police for that, but not for their know-it-all, puritanical, busybody attitudes, or their thick inability to recognize literary merit and the reality of the messy stories of all humanity. It lowers a book-banner’s credibility to talk about a single scene or paragraph, because a book is an entirety. You cannot properly judge a book by one paragraph or one scene. Or because it has that one F-word in it. A book is whole, true in its own context—and it must be read and understood as such.

I know these things by knowing human nature; by raising two boys; and by listening to the stories of what thousands of my students told me they had read so far, in their young book-lives. For years, I taught writing at the University of Utah, at Salt Lake Community College, and at a public middle school in Baltimore. On more than one occasion, I had recent high school graduates and returned missionaries come up to me in class holding a “banned” book and asking questions like, “Why did this book get banned? I’ve read it and there were some parts that were a little graphic, but they were important parts of the story.” Yup. Just the other day, I did some research on why some folks once wanted to ban the children’s book, Stuart Little. Yes, the tiny mouse/boy. The reason? Bestiality. Because there’s only one way you can get a mouse/boy. I kid you not. That is ridiculous, and it says more about the abhorrent mind of the reader and the school board which banned it than it says about the book itself. Fortunately, the Stuart Little ban did not last long.

If you desire to pull The Bluest Eye off the DHS shelf, make sure you pull everything Toni Morrison has ever written. Her main characters all experience challenging situations (just as characters in any book do, or else we wouldn’t read them). Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature almost 30 years ago. So what would she know about telling a story? To heck with books that are meritorious and true to not-always-white, unfortunate characters. If we read Morrison’s books, we might learn something about art and language and culture and families who endure racism, poverty, and lack of education—people who start life already defeated. We might learn compassion.

In The Bluest Eye, the rape of a child—by the child’s own father—happens in a two-page scene , and it is not easy to get through. The scene always makes me feel repulsed, brokenhearted, and angry. When I read it, I usually have to close the book for a time before I can finish reading the rest of the story. I sometimes choose to skip the scene altogether. See that—I have the agency to choose what I read. The passage is in no way pornographic, and to suggest so is to belittle the child who is raped. The passage is not prurient in any way. It is a devastating scene, deserving of our empathy and regard. There is a lot of feeling to be dealt with, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be on a high school library shelf. We all have to wrestle with life’s vicissitudes. We all need to learn something about dealing with tragedy, loss, and complicated love. We shouldn’t be sheltered from reading about it when we are young, so that it smacks us in the face and drops us to our knees when we finally encounter it when we graduate, leave home, and enter the larger world. To keep age-appropriate hard things from kids is to cripple them just when they are seeking to establish their independence. When faced with a situation they’ve been sheltered from, they haven’t been taught the tools they will need to have in order to make good choices about what to do, or they might just run back home where the too-constant shelter has made them narrow and ill-equipped for independence. That’s a decimating kind of defeat for a new adult.

If you want to ban The Bluest Eye from the DHS library, be prepared to get rid of the Bible wherever you find it, because there’s child rape in there, too—as well as incest, domestic abuse, infidelity, drunkenness, and on and on. Also, you better move completely out of Millard County because all of those things happen in your towns. But, of course, they happen in every town, so I guess you might as well stay. You would be surprised to know how much the kids know about the adult hijinks that goes on around them in a small town. I knew about plenty when I was growing up there, and I didn’t hear it from my parents. I usually told them the news, and then we would talk and they would help me understand the repercussions of the hijinks. (I was lucky we could talk like that.) That was before we had the internet or iPhones. The kids find out even more quickly now. Some kids, but probably not most, might tell their parents about what they know and read. If they do talk to you about what goes on or what they read, don’t pontificate. Ask them questions about what they think about things. Tell them humbly what you think about those same things. They are trying to figure out how to handle the knowing.

I find it interesting that what those who would ban The Bluest Eye cite as the reason for it usually this one particular scene. They don’t seem to have any problem with the ingrained racism, the beatings, the destitute poverty, or any of the other trials that are part of the story. None of that offends them. So I guess those things are okay. We can have books that realistically show those things in the library. Hey, I have an idea: let’s rip those few pages of the child-rape scene out and keep the rest of The Bluest Eye on the high school library shelf.

I have never been inside the new DHS library, but I have no doubt I could walk between the shelves and pull out a book at random, and find something in it somebody somewhere would find objectionable. Banning books ends up being arbitrary—someone doesn’t like or understand something they saw in a book, so they want to save all the kids from it—even as you can hear profanity and bullying in the halls between classes. If you want to ban something, do the students a favor and dedicate yourself to banning the bullying at DHS. That is a grave daily danger to students, certainly more harmful to bullied kids than any book. With school districts in Utah worrying about lawsuits and bad press, all it takes is a very-tiny-but-obnoxiously-loud fuss for a school district to crumble to the unreasonable whims of a few fussers. Look, I haven’t lived in Delta for five years now, so I have no idea who the members of the school board even are. I probably even know and like them. I know of the woman spear-heading the ban, but I do not know her personally. I write this post on principle, without regard to the persons involved, when I say I am disappointed that, according The Chronicle, some of the board members showed support for pulling literature off the shelves of a public school. I am disgusted that any school board member would support the narrowing of students’ education. Unfortunately, however, I am not surprised by their support. I love me my Delta and my DHS and my Delta family and friends, but there is far too much giving-in to certain squeaky wheels just to keep any kind of noise down.

As far as what books you read, you can decide for yourself. I can too. The Constitution says so. You can tell your kids what books you will allow them to read, but know that they likely will read exactly whatever they want.: you just won’t know about it. That’s it. Nobody gave a loud person or loud small group the right to decide for everybody else in the community what is available for them to read. So who should decide what goes in a high school library? I see nothing wrong if we leave that to the professionals. It’s the school librarian’s job to ultimately choose and manage books that can educate and speak to the experience of all students, regardless of the librarian’s faith or political party. So you better pick an extraordinary librarian who puts the student population’s wide-ranging educational needs first. If a school district hires a lazy librarian, it’s the kids who will suffer. If librarians are doing their jobs correctly they should be reading book reviews and books, looking at book award winners, and then obtaining library books that represent all of the school’s students, not just the majority. Add to that a balanced community committee of readers who are representative of the entire community, not just the majority. ALL of those asking for a book to be tossed should have to read that book AND participate in an open-forum discussion of said book with people who advocate for keeping the book on the shelf. Never, ever, ever advocate for banning a book you have not read. Don’t let anyone get away with that crapola either. Banning books that are superbly written and make the reader think makes a mockery of the 1st Amendment. You might as well ban that.

FYI I promise, the personal stuff I have to say about this topic will show up tomorrow. I don’t know how juicy it is, but if I wrote a book about it, I don’t think it could show up in the DHS library. It will have that word “gay” in it, and that might make anything I publish unacceptable for teen consumption. I wonder how I handled actually being that word as a teenager at DHS. 🤔