A Call for Rating Books Similarly to Movies

A long list of sponsors have decided to invent and celebrate (celebrate?) “Banned Books Week“, as if every parent who ever questioned what other people are feeding his/her children’s heads were some kind of cretin.   So the pinched nose school librarians, sneering “literature” teachers, and booksellers, booksellers, and more booksellers, all rally ’round, point fingers and make mad faces at a vanishingly small (ahem, invented) group of “opponents”.

When was the last time you heard of someone calling for a book to be banned?  (Didn’t think so.)

On the contrary.  In my day, my own my high school forced the most miserable books of the day  down our throats.  That pervert loser JD Salinger’s books & short stories were the worst.  There was no redeeming value or character in any of them.  I’d like to say I’d go home and sit by the toilet so I could wretch after reading each of the assigned chapters, but really I merely concluded my English Literature teacher was crazy as a loon.  (Time ultimately proved that he was.)   My parents let most of it go by, but they drew the line at the newest big thing off the press, “The Godfather”.   They never once asked for the book to be “banned”.   Ridiculous.  They simply spoke with the teacher and said, “We don’t care what the rest of the class is reading, but we’ve read “The Godfather” ourselves, and we feel the bloodthirsty crimes and the mafia evil are not something we want our daughter wallowing in until she’s older and chooses to read it for herself.  We request she be allowed a substitute book.”   So the teacher agreed to “All the President’s Men”.

So much for bug-eyed raging “book burners”.   But that’s exactly how thoughtful parents have been castigated for generations now, intimidated out of even questioning what schools are assigning, in the false name of “literature”.

So have you looked at what’s being forcing down kids’ throats now-a-days?   It’s far worse!   (Goes to show, the more you let people get away with, the worse they will get.)   We had to outright change schools 3 times – once for my son, and twice for my daughter, in middle school and high school, in order to lift them out of the miserably dreary depressing book-sewage their schools, supposedly run by adults, were forcing them to swim in. Week after dreadful weak.  Book after worse book.  My sweet happy kids were sinking into sleepless depressions, because their child-innocences were being pierced with horrid thoughts and scenarios woven by dark, dark adults.   When the choice becomes drug my kids (with anti-depressants) or ripping out the source of the depression, you bet I go with the latter, every time.  And I did, several times.  And it worked.  Gave them a few weeks in new clean environments, and they brightened right up.  Why leave them there, and destroy what little was left of their childhoods?

And we wonder why the teenage years are so prone to suicide.  Read the books that are assigned to your kids, and you will find out!

The bottom line on teenage suicide rates is because non-parent adults LOVE it.  They write the dark books and assign the dark books.  For your kids, to your kids.  Book after book, week after week, year after year.  (Yes, the world reeks of evil. And they’re after your kids.)

No kidding, barely a year after one of the former members of our world renown & beloved city boys’ chorus, who was then a student at the local city high school, took his own life, an English teacher at that same high school got on FaceBook and bragged about forcing his students to read “The Virgin Suicides”, a fiction book that glorifies and sexifies the sequential suicides of 5 sisters, dwelling on the local teenage boys’ fascination & obsession with each ofthe dead girls. Page after page after dreadful page.  (What kind of sick mind fantasizes this stuff, much less commits it to paper and publishes it!?)  As luck had it, I happened to see this teacher’s bragging announcement on FaceBook go by.

It was just all too much. I got in his face and asked him, “What’s the matter with you??  What the hell are you doing glorifying teenage suicide??  Has <redacted> High not met its quota yet this year?”

I’m beginning to think there’s something in the book bindings that makes all literature teachers crazy as loons, like mad hatters sniffing the hat-bending chemicals.  They can’t all be evil, can they?   (But why, yes, yes they can.)

I’m not talking about censorship for adults or “banning” anything.  We have age requirements for what you put in your mouth, alcohol and cigarettes, what you see in the movies, and what you buy at the video game store.  I think we need one for what children put in their heads, too.   Just as there are movies that require a chaperone to see, likewise there are books that do not belong in the backpacks of children not old enough to see R- rated movies.  After decades of intimidation and name calling by the people targeting our children, it’s time we finally sneer back and start a ratings system for the books that random adults in our children’s lives are assigning them.

Apparently, U.S. News & World Report agrees with me.