"Oh, nobody will listen to him . . ." I've been thinking a lot lately about the right wing's book-banning campaigns, and it's brought me to an odd, though still tentative, conclusion: The right takes words, especially the words in books, seriously -- if they didn't, why would they be trying so hard to control access to them? -- but for m…
"Oh, nobody will listen to him . . ." I've been thinking a lot lately about the right wing's book-banning campaigns, and it's brought me to an odd, though still tentative, conclusion: The right takes words, especially the words in books, seriously -- if they didn't, why would they be trying so hard to control access to them? -- but for many of the rest of us it's more or less "Whatever."
Sure, we're against yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater, and many of us believe that maybe it's best not to make certain books available to people below a certain age. But I'm wondering how much of the lamentable delay in bringing Trump and his followers somewhere close to justice is due to our collective respecting of their free-speech and other rights far more strongly than they respect ours. Because it's backed us into a place where I've got my fingers crossed we can get out of.
We definitely have to get out of this space. We cannot let greedy, wealthy, religiously "righteous" and zealots hungry for power destroy our hard-won freedoms. Every one of us can find some way to fight this and we don't have to pick up a gun to do so.
"Oh, nobody will listen to him . . ." I've been thinking a lot lately about the right wing's book-banning campaigns, and it's brought me to an odd, though still tentative, conclusion: The right takes words, especially the words in books, seriously -- if they didn't, why would they be trying so hard to control access to them? -- but for many of the rest of us it's more or less "Whatever."
Sure, we're against yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater, and many of us believe that maybe it's best not to make certain books available to people below a certain age. But I'm wondering how much of the lamentable delay in bringing Trump and his followers somewhere close to justice is due to our collective respecting of their free-speech and other rights far more strongly than they respect ours. Because it's backed us into a place where I've got my fingers crossed we can get out of.
We definitely have to get out of this space. We cannot let greedy, wealthy, religiously "righteous" and zealots hungry for power destroy our hard-won freedoms. Every one of us can find some way to fight this and we don't have to pick up a gun to do so.