A word about electricity and a lot about book bans

 

I may be the last person in the world you would suspect of doing scientific investigations, but I sort of did today. When I found both my teakettle and my can opener weren’t working, I unplugged them, moved them to another plug—and voila! They worked. Just when I was on the verge of calling the electrician who has worked on my house for years. When I told Christian this, he (much more practical than I), said, “It probably just needs to be reset.” And he did. And tonight they both work in their original spots. I also read the troubleshooting directions for my garbage can and decided what we hadn’t done was to unplug it and leave it for hours. That was less successful. It still doesn’t work. Still, one savors the small victories.

I am overcome tonight with the hate in the world. A lengthy article on a bookseller’s newsletter this morning details an Arkansas law that bans almost every good book I’ve ever read and jeopardizes not only the jobs and income but the freedom of librarians, teachers, and booksellers. Can you spell Nazi? The law, signed by the odious Governor Sarah Huckaby (yes, I used a pejorative adjective) provides that anyone can challenge the ”appropriateness” of a book in public libraries, but it does not define “appropriateness” nor does it provide a standard by which to judge books. Those who support the law say anyone under eighteen should not have access to books that include racism, sexual activity, or LGBTQ topics. They call such books indoctrination. I call such laws suppression of knowledge. Seventeen organizations, including booksellers, librarians, publishers and parents and some international groups, have brought a lawsuit. I wish the Godspeed.

I did not raise my children in a vacuum. I remember when one of my daughters read Flowers in the Attic, about four children struggling to survive as they are hidden in the attic of a mansion. Scary stuff but intriguing to a fourteen-year-old mind. We talked about it. When she moved on to books by Danielle Steele, I did read a couple of them, because I wanted to know what my child was reading. One of her brothers was devoted to the Dungeons and Dragons series and was the kind of a kid who read by flashlight under the covers at night. I never had a complaint about that, except that he was hard to wake in the mornings. None of my four grew up to be a sex maniac, racist, or bigot.

The Arkansas law means booksellers can be liable for displaying “questionable” books but does not define questionable. That means booksellers can display only innocuous titles—cookbooks, maybe?—or they have to forbid children to come into the store. If there was anything my son Jamie loved, it was a trip to the bookstore where he would beg and plead until I bought whatever caught his fancy. And I remember a nephew who at fourteen or so was fascinated by Anne Rice’s vampire fiction. He’s a successful physician today, father of four, a good guy.

Locally, I am not over my disappointment in Mayor Mattie Parker of Fort Worth. The Fort Worth Public Library prepared a big publicity campaign—print materials, etc.—for its annual Mayor’s Summer Reading Program, with a special Pride Badge for youngsters who read one book with an LGBTQ theme. A splinter group—with “Liberty” in its name, of course (such words have become red flags to me)—complained to the mayor and she caved. Gave the library an ultimatum: withdraw the Pride Badge or she would withdraw her endorsement. The library felt it had no choice and withdrew the badge. So wrong. I wished for just a moment there that I were director of the library because I would have, I hope, told the mayor to go fly a kite. And she did this at the beginning of National Pride Month. Bad call, bad timing, Mayor Parker.

Today I read that Texas and Florida (of course) have passed stringent laws that forbid immigrants from certain countries to buy land except under certain circumstances—proof of citizenship or a green card and then only land not close to a military installation, etc. The laws in large part are aimed at Asians and decisions are often made on facial structure. Is this really the land of the free?

There’s a meme on Facebook that says if you have to pass laws punishing certain minority groups to prove your faith or morals, you have no faith or morals to prove. So true.

I cannot fathom people with so much hate and fear in their hearts, but I know that they are a slim minority, and we must all fight back, each of in whatever way we can, to keep them from changing the face of our land, the way we live and raise our children. My moral standard may not be yours—as long as neither of us infringe on each other or commit a crime against society, that’s fine with me. How about you?

No sweet dreams tonight. Dream instead of every good book you want your children or grands to read.

 

Sanitizing the South

All across the South there’s a move to take down Confederate statues. They are symbols of a dark blot on our history—slavery, the plantation system, an era of extreme human bondage, cruelty to humans. I do not believe that these monuments were built to terrify blacks, as one editorial this morning claimed, but they were built to glorify men who today we do not consider heroes. That they have become rallying points for hate groups probably means that they should come down. But I view that destruction with sadness. It’s like trying to erase history.

The plantation system, with all its inequities and unbelievable cruelty, helped shape the South as we know it today—a region most of us recognize has a rich heritage of literature, music, art, food, and manners. The Civil War, fought to preserve slavery or that culture (depends on your point of view), shaped our country in ways we can never fully appreciate. It moved us beyond slavery to the land of equality our forefathers wanted. To remove those statues is to attempt to remove history, and we can neither erase nor rewrite history. Those men who fought for the Confederacy were part of the great war which molded us, albeit they were on the wrong side..

Let them stand today as reminders of the schism in our country, the positive outcome of the war, the progress we have made toward being civilized. The hate groups that rally around these statues (with tiki torches, no less—how inappropriate is that?) are beyond the understanding of most of us. But rather than spend money, effort, and time taking down statues, let us direct our energies to combatting hatred in our country. What can we do to reach out to those people, understand them (there probably is no understanding), help them change and rid themselves of anger? If I were convinced tearing down statues would help, I’d be for it. But I think it will only further enrage them—that is, of course, why they were in Charlottesville, to protest the scheduled teardown of a statue of Robert E. Lee.

If we sanitize the history of the South we might well begin to look at other parts of the country. The cowboy myth of the American West wasn’t particularly violent, but the clashes between settlers and native American were awash in cruelty on either side, unbelievable barbarianism and cruelty. Shall we destroy statues to pioneers and Native American leaders, besmirch Daniel Bowie and others? History has given us a re-interpretation of Custer’s Last Stand, one in which the general doesn’t come out well at all. Can we not apply that lesson to the South without destroying monuments?

And what about New England? Those Puritans could be extremely cruel and insensitive to those who didn’t think as they did. Shall we ban The Scarlet Letter from school reading lists?

When we try to rewrite or erase history, we start down a slippery slope. Surely, we can be more constructive. I am proud to be an American and proud of our heritage. I decry those who would pervert that heritage and use it for hatred. But, as a literature and history student, I want to preserve our history intact.

This was hard to write and didn’t come out the way I wanted at all, but I have done my best. Many of my colleagues and good friends will disagree vehemently, and I understand that.