Felicitations, fellow ingrates!
Today I would like to talk about a concerning trend that seems to be sweeping the nation: censorship. People are getting up in arms about taking books out of public and school libraries for numerous reasons. Take for instance, "James and the Giant Peach", by Roald Dahl. According to these guys: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/29/the-11-most-surprising-ba_n_515381.html#s76413
the reasoning behind it is, quote, "obscenity and violence". Okay, I agree: there was some promoted aggressive feelings in the book. But quite frankly, my favorite part of that book was when the aunts were crushed by the runaway peach.
*sighs dramatically* Yet another piece of my childhood snatched away into the furnace...
Seriously, though: I can understand why parents would get quite distressed by this book: right off the bat, James' parents are mauled by a rampaging rhinoceros! You don't want your child to read garbage like that, do you? Pah! The nerve! Imagine that Dahl fellow, using his blasted creativity to write about a child in need! We can't let our children think that anything bad will happen in the world! Oh, the horror!
Face it, Mrs. McOverbearing, your kid is going to learn eventually that life isn't all cake and ice-cream. If it were, there wouldd be no creative need to include things like that in books!
And that's not even the worst of it...
If you haven't already heard of it in an English or History class, The Diary of a Young Girl, better known as the Diary of Anne Frank, was the diary of a young girl who lived in Amsterdam, right in the midst of the Holocaust. It is one of the greatest reminders of a time when (ironically) censorship extended beyond books, but to an entire people.
And now, it's being banned.
Please join me now in exclaiming to the heavens, "WHAT?????"
The Washington Post reported that a Virginian school system will no longer assign the book to their reading lists because of "sexually explicit material" and "homosexual themes". Other excerpts include, "details of her emerging sexual desires, and unflattering descriptions of her mother and other people living together." In actuality, they are only banning one version of the book, the edition published 50 years after her death in a Nazi death camp. The reason they are censoring it is for the same reasons listed here: the sexually explicit parts.
*bangs head against desk*
Come ON, people! Get it through your heads that this stuff ACTUALLY HAPPENS, and it needs to be taught to our kids. Unlike Dahl's book, which is pure fiction (yet delightfully entertaining for a young whippersnapper, might I add), the Diary of Anne Frank is real, hardcore, no-kidding fact. People actually went through that stuff. I think it's really incredible that in the midst of being persecuted like this, a 13-year-old girl could find the time to keep a diary about all the little things, including "her emerging sexual desires". Imagine that: the normal things of life that any teenage girl would write about included in a memoir of a horrible atrocity. Banning The Diary of a Young Girl for being harsh about reality would be like banning Huckleberry Finn for...
...oh, yeah...
Peace, love, and a Communism-free farm,
--JesusFreak
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/28/AR2010012804001.html?hpid=sec-education
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