I am well familiar with this list, I buy appropriately aged Christmas gifts off it all the time. And when I'm in a particularly persnickity mood, I buy any copies I might find at garage sales and in bargain bins...and donate them to the local schools. Doesn't fix anything, but I hope that someday it will give one of them an opportunity to re-examine a decision they might have made. And it's a reward if they haven't banned them.

We can't change history by ignoring it, or the artistic products of an age. We can't learn from history if we leave it unexamined. Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird may use words or social structures that we rightfully abhorent now, but they were also part of what changed that time. Read within their appropriate social context, they can advance our understanding. For myself, it was only in reading about that era I learned things that my sheltered, liberal upbringing could not have taught me. At the very least, in reading them we can celebrate what has changed. The very fact that Twain now has the power to discomfort people tells us something good about ourselves.

And the same goes for books that have been banned because they tell us uncomfortable things about ourselves today. I have never understood how anyone feels that we can be protected by ignorance. And banning Harry Potter is like trying to ban imagination. Show me someone who thinks they're accompllishing anything by keeping their kids from reading about magic...and I'll bet you dollars to dust bunnies, their kids STILL play "lets pretend we have magic powers." Magical thinking is just a stage kids go through, it's a natural expression of their frustration with their reletive powerlessnenss in the world. They don't need to have it shown to them...they come up with it on their own.

Anyway, I always thought that the most important poliltical post is school board member, in a lot of ways. This sort of nonsense is why.