Let’s Stop Being So Goddamn Polite
States are banning books to appease the complaints of sad, narrow-minded and perverted bigots.
The perverted bigots are losing their sad and narrow little minds because they are losing the future and they know it. They are freaked out and dangerous, because they know there are more of us than there are of them and they’re not making enough new bigoted perverts to keep up with history.
“Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution?” pondered Edward Abbey in his 1968 ecological manifesto Desert Solitaire. “I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.”
No one needs to be mean about this. But we sure don’t need to be polite, either. Just lead with our joy. Do no harm; take no shit.
Our fascist bigots are more than well-represented in our legislatures and coddled by our media punditocracy. They can take it. The simple fact of the matter is that good guys don’t ban books. We must start there, because books are instruments of ideas that expand perspective and raise consciousness. There is a perversion of education, of perspective, of thinking and of learning about the wider world behind any and all efforts to ban books from schools and public libraries…