Ban the Books

There was a time in this country when a book being banned was front page news. The story and its follow up often outlasted the initial 24 hour news cycle. Those days are gone now. Books being banned today are just another news clip fighting for air time with hundreds, if not thousands of other insane events. It becomes just another contributor to the deafening background noise that swirls around all of us today.

Of the thousands of catastrophic events, man made and otherwise, that are in play on any given day, the leaders of the Right force their gas lit messages into the public square. Pro Choice v Pro Birth is the poster child of the inane and stupid issues at the core of the Right's effort to control the messages that we take in. Little of the distractions they jam down our throats are ever as important to all of us as it is to their goal of taking control using every weapon they have in their sleazy quiver of tricks. 

Concerns about book banning, burning and other closed culture acceptances of the silencing of Free Speech should be at the top of the lists of indignities we all have filed in our brain pans. Instead many of us find it more important to waste valuable time and resources legislating away a woman's right to choose, legislating what educators can and cannot teach their children, and creating legislation to squeeze certain groups out of their access to the voting booth. And yes, the same group of Right Wing assholes want to decide through legislation what can be read at the public library.

In my opinion, the right to read any goddamn thing I want is as important if not more so than any other right to Free Speech. Controlling as much of the messaging we absorb through the various media outlets inhibits our ability to think freely and therefore we are then unable to coherently speak freely. 

Critical thinking needs massive amounts of information from everywhere to be effective. Putting up roadblocks to that ability is what the Republican Party and the Right wants. They should be ashamed of themselves, but they are to busy frothing at the mouth slurping their party's kool aid and at the moment they cannot get their heads out of the party's ass long enough to see just what their leadership is doing to all of us, them included.

Rant over ............ Later ....................................

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 Found this little ditty "Ban the Books" very quickly. It fits with the post better than my post fits with the post.