Be careful of what you get bored by...
“You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.” Joni Mitchell
Be careful of what you get bored by, it might hop up and bite ya…
Consider: Just a week past was declared National Library Week. Not an occasion of exuberant celebration and widespread loud hallooing; more of a perfunctory designation profoundly and thoroughly ignored by pretty much everybody who isn’t a librarian.
Mayhap we grew indifferent too soon…
Cue Joni Mitchell: “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone…”
In the case of the shelves at the Nimitz Library at the United States Naval Academy that would be darn near 400 books – books pulled off the shelves because somebody who hasn’t read ‘em doesn’t like what might be in ‘em … I won’t name names, but he lives in a big white house on Pennsylvania Avenue.
I guess the concern is that those books might put troubling ideas in those young cadets’ heads, but really, shouldn’t folks who are training to command nuclear submarines and sail aircraft carriers be able to read Maya Angelou without being psychically incapacitated?
Of course, banishing 400 volumes out of a collection of nearly 600,000 books hardly eviscerates the institution. What it does eviscerate is the principles of free inquiry and unfettered access to information and expressed opinion. Taking books off library shelves takes ideas away from you, me, and everybody else … without our assent or permission.
While this was going on in Annapolis, other shit was hitting the fan in Bismark.
On Monday North Dakota legislators passed a bill that makes it a felony for a librarian to keep on the shelves potentially within the reach of anyone under 18, any book the local prosecutor deems to contain “sexually explicit” material … all with the stated purpose of protecting kids from porn.
The bill isn’t specific as to how much of a book does a prosecuting attorney need to read to determine if it’s dirty enough to send Marian the Librarian to the slammer, but it does allow for a committee of local blue-noses to appeal lest an errant illustrated copy of Gray’s Anatomy fall under innocent eyes.
It is rather quaintly comforting to imagine that kids in North Dakota still get their porn fix nervously perusing select paragraphs from Peyton Place in a secluded nook deep in the public library stacks. However, since I have considerable confidence that any North Dakota kid who’s made it past infancy can Google “porn” and be overwhelmingly rewarded, just who do these patronizing politicos think they’re fooling? They simply fear there are books that explore topics they’re not comfortable with and ideas they oppose and disapprove of sitting on library shelves and claiming to protect kids from filth is a publicly palatable excuse to get them out of there…out of reach of young folks and, preferably, out of reach altogether.
Simply put, banning books means banning ideas. It makes knowledge forbidden. It takes away the one freedom that makes all freedoms possible: the freedom to know.
And as libraries are targeted, freedom is in the line of fire.
Let’s just make sure this is clear: In North Dakota, allowing the wrong person to read the wrong library book is a felony offense.
Maya Angelou and other ideologically disfavored authors are banned from the Naval Academy library.
North Dakota is part of the Unites States. So is the Naval Academy.
Yes, it can happen here…
But only if we let it.