Bookalicious

Welcome to Bookalicious and Censorship week. We all know I am a huge advocate for censoring in your own home and leaving others to do what they wish in their own. Instead of giving you post after post of my own opinion, I wanted to bring in some other awesome bloggers to give us their take on censorship and what it means to them personally and their thoughts on what it means to us as a society. Humans through the ages have always banned, censored, rallied against, and protested anything that fell beyond their comfort zones. Whether that zone is in place due to religion, upbringing, or personal morals I have never understood the need to force others to your mentality. As bloggers we have the platform to be anti-censorship. To be a flagship of open content and doing and saying on our own blogs what we see fit. We must outwardly oppose censorship of any piece of literature, even if we are censoring it in our own homes. What if we are the next to be censored? Freedom of journalistic integrity and blogging taken away. What then?

Here is what Amy from My Friend Amy has to say:

One of the things I most love about reading is that it is a low risk way to confront my prejudices. Often, going into a book, I have no idea that some of my ideas about life or people might be challenged. I might not realize that I’ll be asked to slip into the mind of someone very different from myself and feel the things they feel as they experience a variety of situations I may never experience. I really believe that reading fiction allows me to become a more sympathetic person.

This is one of the reasons I cannot tolerate the idea of censorship. Granted, I have always read what I wanted to read. It’s a freedom I do not take for granted, especially as I’m learning more and more about book banning. Censorship is a form of control that should not be tolerated in our society. Censorship is when one person or groups of people try to shape the information intake and thus the way another group of people thinks. This usually benefits a majority rules type mindset. This is particularly cruel, because books are often where we first discover we are truly not alone.

Are books a cause for fear? Well yes. Because reading by its very nature encourages thought, sympathy, empathy, imagination, and the changing of one’s mind. If you are seeking a world uniform in thought, a world that is grey, where injustice goes unnoticed, and everyone is exactly the same then books are the most terrifying objects there are. Books contain the the story of us, of all of us, humans working out our different situations through artistry, trying to make sense of the messy, holy, mystery of life. But no book is a simple object and no reading experience invites a uniform response. Each individual responds and reacts to what they find in the pages of a book in a way that is unique to them.

Living in this world is hard. There is no reason to make it harder by trying to control the way we think, by barring books that express a different worldview from ours from the shelves, by robbing ourselves of the chance to feel a little more human compassion for one another, to feel angry by injustice, to feel empowered to realize we are not alone. Can’t we put aside our fear and instead open our ears and start talking to one another instead?