Recently, there was a board meeting in a school district that is located in the suburbs north of Pittsburgh known as Pine Richland. The topic of the meeting was the scope of a proposed book ban. This was at least the third school district in Western Pennsylvania to attempt imposing book bans on their students over the past few years.
The unsettling trend that is growing in school districts nationwide is a vocal minority of bigots, that probably don’t have any children attending these schools, have singled out libraries and lead the efforts to ban books from them. If, by chance, they do have a child that attends one of these schools, it’s an attempt by the parents to stifle their children into fitting the narrow scope of their own world view. If it wasn’t for the large amount of books that I’ve read over the years, I’d probably be just as dumb and tuned out as the majority of people in the Pittsburgh area. It took a lot of work to deprogram myself and to be able to see through the bullshit.
With all of the screaming and yelling they do about books, have these idiots never heard of the internet? I’m sure that whatever is in the books they’re trying to have banned is relatively tame compared to what can be found in the awful depths of the internet. And kids aren’t stupid. They’ll get to what they want to get to regardless of any parental protection software that can be installed on their devices.
There are so many ways to fuck up raising a child and withholding information is one of them. Once a child steps out into the world and starts to have experiences outside of the parental bubble, they very quickly begin to learn how full of shit their parents actually are.
Some parents are dumb enough to think that it’s their right to keep their kid hidden behind the same veil of willful ignorance that they cover themselves with. Fine, go ahead and think that. These parents may want their own children to be as stupid as they are but they cannot try to extend that stupidity to someone else’s child.
I thought the purpose of educating our children was to make the next generation smarter and better than the one before. That’s why our property taxes go toward funding our schools so we can have a community that’s a little less dumb over time. Well, that used to be the case. Now our tax dollars go toward building sports facilities instead of educational materials. Our children can have a nice new stadium to give each other brain damage and ruin their knees but textbooks that were printed in the past twenty years are out of the question. And don’t even mention teaching them art, music and the humanities. We’re creating cogs that can fit into the Capitalist machine, not people that can think.
This rapid increase of ignorance and lack of critical thinking skills is appalling to me. I’m tired of dumb motherfuckers trying to impose their will on everyone in some bizarre attempt to make us all dumb motherfuckers. I refuse to be brought down to their level to wallow in the muck of their stupidity that they somehow wear like a badge of honor. I have never seen a group of people be so proud to be so dumb and think that they are so right. Instead of raising ourselves up to be smarter, let’s lower the bar and force everyone to get dumber.
Most of the time the books in question aren’t even on the shelves in the school libraries in the first place so the whole thing is nothing but an exercise in feigned outrage and a complete waste of everyone’s time. Any time one of these dipshits trundle in front of a camera to be interviewed by the sad excuse for local media, they should be asked if they actually read any of the books they’re objecting to. Chances are they haven’t and I’d be surprised if they could read at all. And of course they won’t be asked that question out of the need for local media to keep up the veneer of being impartial and not wanting to seem biased by asking the obvious.
At one of these school board meetings some dumb ass went so far as to bring in a pastor from out of state to speak. It’s a public school district, this pastor, with his bullshit religion and opinions, can fuck right off.
After years of being laughed out of the room during meetings, these morons somehow figured out how to run for open seats on school boards and are embedding themselves in the education system like the dimwitted parasites they are. Having dullards in even the lowest positions of power is a danger to us all. As has been made very clear since anti-intellectualism took over this country in the 1980s and is currently on full display.
This is all rooted in homophobia, racism and all the other phobias and isms, full stop. Books don’t turn kids gay. Books help gay kids learn to become ok with who they are because they’re forced to put up with ignorant dumbfuck parents.
History books that aren’t written from the perspective of whitewashed bias may eventually lead to a reckoning that this country has always refused to have over its violently white supremacist past and present. Oh no, the truth of multiple genocides being used to build this country might tarnish our image of bullshit patriotism. Fewer children might grow up to be cops or join the military, whatever will we do. I’m all for kids learning that Capitalism is a blackhole that will eventually kill all of us as soon as they possibly can so they can start working on solutions that previous generations have either refused or failed to come up with.
Trying to keep the morons at bay is getting more and more difficult. Their numbers are growing and getting louder and more violent while they cry foul at even the slightest inconvenience to their stupidity. And the opposition is getting weaker and weaker out of fear of upsetting the violent mob of idiots that don’t know how to process their emotions.
Everything has to be dumbed down to the level of a pop up book with rounded corners or the heaving mass of stupid will have a conniption. And these are the same people that complain until they’re blue in the face that everybody else is too sensitive these days when they get called out on their bigotry.
This is one of the growing number of instances where I see no viable solution other than stepping out of the way and laughing at these intellectual lightweights punch themselves in the nuts while they can’t figure out why their nuts hurt. I know I’m stuck in the middle of this trainwreck of a society and it’s only going to get exponentially worse by the end of this decade.
I guess I’ll stay in my house full of books and records until I get dragged off to the de-education camp for my lobotomy. Fuck it.
Here's a link to the Digital Public Library Of America:
They provide free digital access to books that have been banned.
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