Celebrate in Your Favorite Way

September 30th, 2004 · No Comments
by Booksquare

We know you’re not counting on us to remind you about Banned Books Week — which is good because somehow it’s Thursday and we just took our first glance at a calendar this week (which is not to say we haven’t seen calendars on the preceding days…we just happened to spend our hours poking and prodding at calendar theory). If you’re a reader of any note, you already celebrate this week in the style to which you’ve grown accustomed. Probably, if you’re like us, by doing something like reading while eating.

We mostly don’t understand the concept of banning books — as noted, attempts to censor our childhood reading backfired on the mother. Being a smart woman, she figured out the best way to keep us from wandering we should not go was to put lots of interesting obstacles in our way. And that was the genesis of the leaning tower of books we mean to read but can’t quite get to because we have so many other books to read. See, we don’t need therapy to work out our mother issues…

Today’s world offers so many opportunities for children to be exposed to age-inappropriate information. Perhaps it’s because we have cats not humans, but we cannot understand how anyone allows unsupervised television. Giving a child a remote control seems to us a recipe for disaster. Books at least require a lengthy commitment, mentally and emotionally. It’s really hard to take the sexual questioning of a character out of context when you understand the basis. If you’re going to ban something, ban really bad, trashy, demeaning videos*. Don’t ban books. They provide both the questions and the answers. Not always the best possible answers, but if you reached adulthood by making only the right choices, we salute you.

* – No, we are not seriously suggesting censorship. We’ve had the misfortune to watch enough MTV while at the gym to see that some of the stuff on there is pretty bad. A little parental oversight wouldn’t hurt.

File Under: Square Pegs