This is Tuesday Top of Mind where I write about anything that is top of mind.
This is a heavy lift after Monday, which used to be Monday Musing with the same premise. Mondays are the longest day of my week. I am on call 2100-0700 Sunday night, and I leave the house at 0615 to drive 90 minutes to the university, work 10 hours as a research assistant, and drive 90 minutes home. To go back on call shift at 2100. It is a LOOOOONNNNNGGGGGG day. If there are no cases I go to bed early.
As a result, my mind is pretty empty on Tuesday mornings. I take the morning to get my head back into the school game and read all the news I missed on Monday. On the first three Tuesdays of the month, I have 0700 meetings. Not today! Today I slept in until 0815 and it was great!
Then I get to reading and engaging with all sorts of news outlets. I am continually looking for things to send to my classmates in their dissertation area, reading the policy news for one of my classes, reading health disparity news for another class, and just reading the rest of the news for me. This fills my brain back up.
Long explanation short, this Tuesday morning I ran across a news item about the changes to the Scholastic Book Fair and how they are self-censoring in a bow to book ban pressure.
I have many complicated feelings about this.
I love the Scholastic Book Fair.
Books were my steady and constant companion while I was growing up.
No one told me what to read or not read as a child. I would not have listened anyway.
But in today’s society, it is different.
Instead of policing what their children read and leaving the rest of us out of it, some parents want to not let ANY BOOK they find objectionable into schools, libraries, and what have you. I find some of the reasons for the objections laughable.
Granted, I’m not a parent.
But I am an aunt who gives books out for Christmas, along with pajamas and socks.
Yes, I’m that aunt.
When I am choosing the books to give at Christmas I don’t ask my siblings what books they object to. I ask about the current interests of the kid and make my own selections based on that.
For some kids, the Scholastic Book Fair was the only place they could see and read books about other kids that looked like them. Or it was a place to explore topics that the kids wanted to learn about but was too afraid to ask the librarian.
Books are important.
Ideas are important.
And the Scholastic Book Fair self-censoring itself because a small minority, granted a very loud minority, wants to be the book police for EVERYONE. Well, I find that shameful and embarrassing for them.
Have they never looked at the internet that most of the rest of the world has?
Again, it is not about the children. It never is.
It is about control over what we learn and how we think and how we live.
That is the scandalous part of this entire debacle.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 