Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Books?

There is a large and growing larger part of this country that distrusts the over-educated. The pointy-headed Eastern Establishment types who are the arbiters of what is what are clashing with their Middle-America, Bible Belted, narrow minded, xenophobic and ethnocentric brethren. So is one of science and one of faith? Are the two divergent philosophies truly so separate it will eventually turn this country in on itself? Spawning armies of truth, each looking opposite directions, back to back? One clutching one single book and the other willing to accept all books written?

Why does education threaten so many? Was it not a way to rise above the poverties of the soul, the mind, the spirit and the body? Imagine down the road a technocratic utopia based on wisdom, intellect and science overthrown by a theocratic doppelganger of Orwellian magnitude. The literary fantasy of the “Handmaid’s Tale” made all too real. A place of resolute dogmatic orthodoxy controlling the citizens for their own good. Liberty and freedom taking a backseat to the undying devotion to what we were told by the zealots the generation before. As in “A Brave New World” where the choice was made and comfort and security won over truth and beauty. Is truth STILL dead?

When one is exposed to too many ideas, do the pre-existing ideas suffer somehow? Become jealous of the new neighbors? Attempt to undermine them and force them into retreat? Is the control of minds a fulltime pursuit for too many here and now? One can seek education, lower or higher, organized or disorganized and individual. A mansion has many rooms and the fact we have so many educational choices must surely be a sign of our diverse strength of thought. A form of safety in numbers so that the intellectual dead ends can co-exist with the more approved and official avenues, helping obscure them, hide them, water them down and marginalize them all.

Public schools and libraries are under pressure to cater to all the roads of thought. The disease of bad ideas, like a virus, spreading, contracting, fought off then conquering territory. From the person who decides what book titles are to be in the catalog, to the person filling out the order form, to the person who can use the “discard” rubber stamp, to the person who tears pages out of the objectionable books that somehow got through... there is a pattern to the tiles in the mosaic. The hard part is to take that step back, un-focus your eyes and see the real picture. Before it is too late.