As we lie in bed nursing our battered and depleted psyches, we are grateful for the rich world of reading we can readily avail of for our needed rest and relief.
Professed bookworms and curious nerds, reading is a love instilled in us early on, that has grown us into the beings we proudly are.
At ground zero of the battle over books and censorship, national correspondent Jeff Fleischmann reports on book banning across America for the last six or seven months.
Pan America found that since 2021 there have been 4,000 cases of books being banned across the country. It is very much wrapped into our culture wars. It's very much wrapped into the identity politics of America right now. We're going to see this issue becoming central in the 2024 campaign.
LeVar Burton proposes this theory about America - in Great Britain they had a king in a castle and in America the idea that every man was a king in his own castle really took hold.
If you extend that metaphor out, then every king in America felt like they had the right to dictate reality, right? Here we are generations later and we haven't bled that tendency out of the body politic yet.
That mindset is still there, that what I say goes - my individual liberty is sacrosanct and is important, above all else.
The idea that the good of the many outweigh the needs and good of the few is a concept that is lost on a lot of folks in this country who are rooted in the idea that their every whim should be not just entertained but indulged.
He advocates for active resistance - in his words, “Don't go for the okie dokie.” We have personal power. Our voices matter in this conversation and so I believe that we should use them.
More than anything else, support literature, support freedom of expression, support an educated society. It is the only thing I think that is ultimately going to save us. We cannot have a functioning democracy without an educated populace.
wonder | wander | world advocates and supports this fully. Don’t go for the okie dokie. Buy banned books. Give them away. Donate them to any reader.
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