As an author of books for teens, I’m a firm believer that fiction can help young people work through feelings and situations without having to experience them. Or, at a time in their life when they feel like they are the only one who is fat, ugly, and dorky (I felt all of these and more as a teen, which is probably why I write novels for this age group) books offer adolescents a lifeline, the all important realization that they are not alone with the powerful emotions they are experiencing.
My parents made no effort to censor my reading material. They were hard pressed to keep up with my voracious appetite for books, and allowed me to read anything I could get my hands on. I’m of the vintage that they didn’t have what’s currently known as young adult literature in my day – I went straight from reading kids books to grown up books. It expanded my horizons and my vocabulary, my knowledge of history and perhaps most importantly of situations that I wasn’t ready to experience, but could learn to process through reading.
There are many things that disturb me about Sarah Palin, the Republican nominee for Vice-President of the United States. But today I will just focus on one issue – that someone who is to be pledged to uphold the Constitution appears to have problems with the First Amendment.
As the New York Times reports:
Shortly after becoming mayor, former city officials and Wasilla residents said, Ms. Palin approached the town librarian about the possibility of banning some books, though she never followed through and it was unclear which books or passages were in question.
Anne Kilkenny, a Democrat who said she attended every City Council meeting in Ms. Palin’s first year in office, said Ms. Palin brought up the idea of banning some books at one meeting. “They were somehow morally or socially objectionable to her,” Ms. Kilkenny said.
The librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, pledged to “resist all efforts at censorship,” Ms. Kilkenny recalled. Ms. Palin fired Ms. Emmons shortly after taking office but changed course after residents made a strong show of support. Ms. Emmons, who left her job and Wasilla a couple of years later, declined to comment for this article.
In 1996, Ms. Palin suggested to the local paper, The Frontiersman, that the conversations about banning books were “rhetorical.”
Those who seek to keep books out of the hands of others disturb me. As a young adult author, I see this happening all too often – parents who don’t want their child to read a book seeking to have a book removed from the library so that no other child can have access to it either. It’s why I’m a member of the group AS IF! (Authors Supporting Intellectual Freedom), in order to fight the same sort of insidious suppression that Ms. Palin intimated with her questioning – and firing - of the Wasilla librarian.
The episode reminds me of the illegal Department of Justice hiring practices under the Bush White House, where career civil servants were discriminated against on the basis of their politics. Do we really want four more years of “Think our way or else?”
In his speech at the Republican convention McCain tried to hijack Barack Obama’s them and recast himself as the true agent of change, but in picking from amongst the book banners like Sarah Palin for his running mate he’s shown that he’s living up to the McSame moniker bestowed upon him by the blogerati. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.
