I wrote nearly 400 words of a blog before finally giving in to the fact that it wasn’t very good.  Honestly, it’s a subject I feel I have something about what to say, but I don’t think I really have enough knowledge to really say it with any type of conviction.  So until I feel I can, I’m going to table that one.

I wrote yesterday about spelling and grammar, and today I read an article about a woman who protested her seventh grader having to read The Diary of Anne Frank because she felt the description of genitalia was “pornographic.”  Imagine, a fourteen-year-old girl was explicit in details about her own body.  Thank goodness nothing like that ever happens these days. 

Obviously, I have many issues with this.

First of all, I don’t believe in censorship.  I believe it was Stephen King, but he could have been paraphrasing someone else, who said to find out those books that people don’t want you to read and make sure you read them.  I don’t care what somebody reads.  I care that they read.  Even bad writing teaches us something.  When I was a kid I read everything I could get my hands on, and honestly some of the things I read by the time I was a seventh grader would make Anne Frank blush. 

Secondly, in reading about this woman’s complaint, I discover that she doesn’t want children to not read the book at all.  No, she just wants them to read the edited version which doesn’t have any mention of genitalia or other sexual thoughts Anne (as many young teenagers do) was having.  So she didn’t want her kid reading about a clitoris, burt reading about hatred and violence and the Holocaust was okay.  Because you have to remember a young girl’s description of her clitoris is too graphic, which means you should ask parents’ permission beforehand, but the Holocaust, yeah, give ‘em as much of that shit as you want.

Of course, this also falls in line with some of my comments in my last blog.  Basically, we’re raising a generation of idiots.  I shudder at the thought of allowing all schooling to the public school system.  Not only do they force-feed them history which in many cases has been proven blatantly false, but most schools now “educate” with nearly the sole purpose of having students pass evaluation tests, so they are pointed towards doing that and not really learning and certainly not learning how to be critical thinkers, how to be explorers of the mind.

It may be this mother thinks she’s actually protecting her child, but she’s not.  She’s a destroyer.  A destroyer of thinking, reading, learning.  She’s a small hammer among thousands of small hammers pounding away at the beauty of reading, a cacophony of senseless noise that becomes a drone.  As her child will.