Celebrate: Read a banned book

It's Banned Books Week - kind of like a Fourth of July for print journalists, wild imaginations, and lovers of that elusive free marketplace of ideas, an incessant revolutionary evolution. Despite man's repeated and fearful attempts to censor them, these works (many of them award-winning classics) persist with their struggle to survive and inspire.

Vive la revolution!

Perhaps you have a favorite on this long list. Mine is "What is Man," by Mark Twain - that very short read which was banned virtually upon publication in 1906. Even today its frank discussion of man's possible motivations faces disapproval.

After all, man is very delicate and vulnerable. Not in control of himself. Mere suggestions can destroy him utterly, turn him to evil. The ideas are always to blame.

Other banned books are better read today, if still with targets on their covers. Thought-provoking and humanistic classics such as Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God," Heller's "Catch-22," and Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" still find their way to banned book lists, and I do mean locally.

Oh, and Harry Potter of course. So too Lord of the Rings. Magic is bad; very bad.

Suggest men are imperfect, hurt each other, love the wrong people, change their minds after new experiences, doubt themselves and their beliefs (wait, we are allowed different beliefs?), wage war by mistake or ill intent - to deal openly with perceived causes and effects of man's errors and triumphs? How dare these authors.

Better to ignore such works; officially sanctioned, simple stories with one set of interpretations only. Naught else permitted. Why give impressionable minds ideas which could arm them with greater depth of thought and understanding when facing their own challenges, or witnessing others'? Nope; heads buried in approved sand are much safer.

Banned Books Week is sponsored by the American Library Association, a tradition since 1982 when libraries saw a surge in attempts to ban in bookstores, schools, and libraries. Each year the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom records hundreds of such attempts. From their web page at ALA.org:

"Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others. As such, they are a threat to freedom of speech and choice."

Freedom of speech... Now why does that sound familiar?

Other banned prize-winners include books by Ernest Hemingway (three of them! Nasty man.), William Faulkner (profanity and abortion mustn't be discussed), John Steinbeck (Now really; the Depression wasn't so awful), Toni Morrison (vengeful ghosts, prolicide, rape... too offensive), and Harper Lee (bye, bye Atticus). What is banned comes and goes with the winds of current culture. Today's "shocker" may quickly become tomorrow's classic, as civilization comes to broader understanding and spiritual growth. Think about what we feared centuries ago, and how those subjects are mainstream now, thanks to deeper understanding.

An Atlantic Monthly education columnist spent years working in schools; his March 2013 column describes his deep disturbance about censorship trends. He wrote of one school district where he'd worked:

"On one project, a colleague of mine working on a world history course was told not to include the fact that gay people were targeted during the Holocaust. In another instance, I was told that I could not, for sensitivity reasons, include a test passage about storms at sea. Passages about rats, or alcohol, or love, or death were similarly proscribed. So were passages that depicted, or even mentioned, slavery - and this was for an American history exam."

Should we refrain from offering first-graders books they couldn't understand? Of course. Pretend painful history didn't happen? That leads only to its repetition.

Should we be sensitive about what might offend people? Yes, but we can address that by discussing controversies - by fully exploring them, rather than banning any mention of sensitive topics.

One of my children's favorite history teachers at CHS made a point of adopting the opposing side of whatever opinions his students expressed, just for the intellectual exercise of teaching them reasoned debate. Successful ideas strengthen when tested; those which fail tend to do so because they were flawed.

To effectively cope with something one must first understand it. We learn by experience; the experiences we don't have we can learn from others. The experiences of people not in our lives we can learn from books. This is the value of great literature.

Yes, life is quite sensitive. To deal with it successfully we must become sensitive to it. This happens not by avoiding it, but by seeking to learn all and learn it thoroughly - as much as possible in a lifetime from as many perspectives as possible. Especially important are those perspectives different from our own.

Knowledge is power. To avoid knowledge offers no protection, only ignorance.

Sholeh Patrick, J.D. is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network. Contact her at sholeh@cdapress.com.