"We must burn the books, Montag . . . ALL the books!"

Once again, my home state has been in the news for something embarrassing: from London to L.A., newspapers have been reporting that the Accomack County School System has been considering banning Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" and Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" from its curriculum because of complaints from a lone student.

This is the most unthinkable and pernicious kind of censorship: trying to cover up the wrongs and ugliness of the past (in this case, the book's villains use a very ugly racial epithet) to calm down one kid's complaints, meanwhile keeping the rest of the students from enriching their lives by reading a lasting work of deep moral, ethical, and social value. "To Kill a Mockingbird" is exactly the kind of novel that kids should be reading--it isn't simply a story about race, but about making difficult moral choices when society itself is wrong and pitted against you. The potential ban of a book of such extraordinary value and power, one writer suggested, makes him want to buy hundreds of copies of the book and hand them out to Accomack County school kids.

"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" presents America during the time of slavery, which shouldn't be presented in a kind or pleasant light. Like "To Kill a Mockingbird," it deals with a youngster who discovers that he has been brainwashed by a racist society, and who rebels against it, in the process realizing that his friend, the escaped slave Jim, has been dehumanized and brutalized by the utterly wrong adults around him. This is NOT an easy or simple book, and it involves some very ugly words and the ability to contextualize them; to deny that those words were once widely used is to lie about history. When you start banning books because one person is offended, where does it stop? Which book is next? Who is the arbiter of what kids can and cannot read? This is the slipperiest of slopes.

The late, great Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" keeps coming up as this controversy is bandied around in the press. Bradbury's Fire Chief, the head book-burner of a completely repressive future, describes why all books must be burned: sooner or later, SOMEONE will be offended by them, and people shouldn't be offended-- when they're offended, they THINK, they get discontented, they question things, they're forced out of their safety zone. In Francois Truffaut's film version, the Chief tells the protagonist, Montag "We must burn the books, Montag . . . ALL the books" as he smiles and holds up a copy of "Mein Kampf."

If you are as horrified by the potential banning of two very valuable and important books, please sign this petition and spread the word about it to other concerned parties:

http://action.everylibrary.org/book_banning_in_virginia_schools