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Posts Tagged ‘censorship’

Banning Books and Things

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 9, 2025| Leave a Comment »

I invited the Love Bug to our local artsy cinema this past weekend to see the documentary, “The Librarians.” Book bans are nothing new, Ray Bradbury wrote about burning books in Fahrenheit 451 during the McCarthy era. But in this movie, in 2025, we learn how an ‘anti-woke’ cabal of parents is trying to criminalize school librarians!

 The film “…focuses on actions in Florida, New Jersey, Louisiana and Texas, where a list of 850 titles compiled in 2021 by State Representative Matt Krause, Republican of Texas, was used to cull the stacks. Nationwide, the group Moms for Liberty packs school boards with candidates who wield Scripture in the name of child safety. In one dumbfounding instance, the Bible is cited as the ultimate standard for nonfiction writing.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/movies/the-librarians-review.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7E8.a3Nf.WoFe1YRfvEHw&smid=url-share

When I first started covering school board meetings for our local newspaper in NJ, I was disillusioned. The meetings were public, yet our community didn’t show up. The school board members had been there for a very long time, in fact not one had a child in the school system. Granted the meetings ran late and parents in this NYC suburb didn’t have time to sit through lengthy discussions on curriculum. But this indifference prompted me to run in the next election for the board, and surprise surprise I won.

Some states appoint their members, while others leave it up to the people. Several states, including Tennessee, use a mix of appointed and elected members. The Bug asked me who appoints these people, which got me thinking. Obviously, if your Governor and or legislators are appointing school board members, the process is inherently political. I had never thought about this before; after all, why dig deeply into our bedrock educational system?

In NJ, school board members are not compensated for their time – in TN they are. I considered my time on the board as public service.

The Constitution doesn’t exactly guarantee a free K-12 education but the 14th Amendment requires “equal protection of the laws” with a due process clause. It’s why Title IX was passed giving girls’ sports programs parity with the boys! This piecemeal approach however, requiring equal protection and due process laws to every citizen, gets chopped up depending on a number of variables: your state and specific school district; and your rural (white) vs urban (brown) tax revenue. Does this sound like an equal or efficient system?

“An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” If Tom Jefferson didn’t say this exactly, he should have!

The Bride asked her daughter what she thought of The Librarians. Her answer – they banned the graphic novel of Anne Frank because of a picture of her in a garden with statues! And Maus, because the mice were naked! Even the Pumpkin was appalled. We talked about my time working with the school librarian at her Mother’s high school after 9/11, and how much I enjoyed it. But that was before Moms for Liberty stormed sleepy school board meetings demanding certain books be pulled from shelves.

What is most troubling, many school districts are pulling books in anticipation of an edict. This is the very essence of Totalitarianism. Create fear, harbor doubt. “Since July 2021, our Index records 22,810 cases of book bans across 45 states and 451 public school districts.” https://pen.org/report/the-normalization-of-book-banning/

This school year alone has seen 6,870 instances of school book bans. If you don’t want your child to have access to age-appropriate books dealing with LGBTQ subjects, like two male penguins who adopted a chick, then let your kids’ teachers know. You can opt them out of sex education right? Keep them in the dark about our country’s history of racism and sexism. Or send them to private Christian schools, or homeschool.

But don’t bring your White Christian Nationalism into the public arena, your MAGA ideology into our school system and act like Joan of Arc. This is me at my drag queen hairstylist’s salon.

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Compelling Speech

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 27, 2024| Leave a Comment »

There is a movement afoot in our country that is downright dangerous. A friend recently told me that silence is best, whenever Israel and Hamas and college protestors might come up in polite conversation. But as I’ve said before countless times like a mantra – it is silence and indifference that led to the Holocaust. At first with small things, like where Jews could go to school, and later with bigger things like where Jews could live and finally sending Jews off to “work camps.” It doesn’t happen all at once, genocide is a big word that begins slowly, with small changes in rules and regulations.

Between packing today for our twice Covid-Osteoporosis-delayed Italy trip, I happened to read about PEN America cancelling our country’s highest literary award ceremony. Why? Half of the participants dropped out of the running because they wanted PEN members to sign a petition stating that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. And an anonymous group on X has created a spreadsheet, titled “Is Your Fav Author a Zionist?” complete with color-coded categories like “pro-Israel/Zionist!”

“Over the past several months, a litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel. This phenomenon has been unfolding in progressive spaces (academia, politics, cultural organizations) for quite some time. That it has now hit the rarefied, highbrow realm of publishing — where Jewish Americans have made enormous contributions and the vitality of which depends on intellectual pluralism and free expression — is particularly alarming… Compelling speech — which is ultimately what PEN’s critics are demanding of it — is the tactic of commissars, not writers in a free society. Censorship, thought policing and bullying are antithetical to the spirit of literature, which is best understood as an intimate conversation between the author and individual readers.” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/27/opinion/publishing-literary-antisemitism.html

Compelling a literary society to speak in a certain way, to denounce a whole group of people, (and believe me at least 80% of Jewish Americans believe Israel has a right to exist, which makes us Zionists I guess) is using the same playbook as banning books IMHO. There have been over 4,000 book bans in schools in just the first half of this year! Parents, going to a public School Board meeting to try and weave their ideology or religious views into the curriculum, are misguided at best and malicious at worst. Our Founding Fathers would roll over in their graves because our very liberty is dependent on separation of church and state.

Of course being able to speak and write what’s on your mind presumes we live in a free society. But do we? Over 339 writers are being held in jails around the world, mostly in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam. In this country, an ex-President can denigrate a judge’s family without being thrown in jail, he can mock reporters with cerebral palsy and talk about grabbing women by their privates. Nothing happens. In fact, he just might get re-elected. But when a comic, say Kathy Griffin, put a bloody picture of T’s head on social media, she was investigated by the DOJ and the FBI and was cancelled. Still, the twice impeached ex-Prez can call for a bloody rebellion…and that’s his free speech I guess.

This morning Bob only scooped five cicadas out of the pool, instead of 50, so maybe we’re over the hump? They should be gone by the time we return from Italy. Last week, Bob and I attended a 6th Grade debate in the halls of the TN Capitol; Hamas and Israel didn’t come up. But I was proud to hear these 12 year olds discuss AI and gun control. Our future Activists are bright and engaging, compelling even, and gave me hope. If only we could start a middle school through high school for Palestinians and Israelis.

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Curricularity

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on January 28, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Yes, I just made up a word, take note Merriam Webster. Curricularity is a noun – a state of mind expressing “… extreme amusement” of any school board member that has been criticized, harassed or generally polarized by parents wishing to be partners in their child’s education.

When I sat on a school board in NJ, I learned quite a lot about the Business of Education.

I got a crash course on marketing when the superintendent wanted to upgrade the track that ran around the football field. I learned more about the composite materials of running tracks than I ever wanted to know. It seems the age-old clay and ash track (or was it asphalt and rubber?) didn’t cut it with the coaches and football parents; we needed to allocate multiple thousands of dollars for a new age synthetic track.

In this country, “… building a 400 meter polyurethane track from scratch typically costs around $1 million. Resurfacing an existing track usually costs about $300 thousand.” https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-build-a-400-meter-track

We needed the other tax-paying-parents to buy in to the scheme, and we needed to convince the Borough Council it was necessary. As a newspaper reporter, I knew the economics of any new building project for a public school meant the money had to come out of some other fund, or you had to get a loan in the form of a bond. It was basic “Guns and Butter.” And most of a school’s budget is spent on… can you guess?

Teacher and Administrator salaries.

In an ideal world, public school board members should not be politically biased. Their mission should be to want only the best for their students; but in reality, many states have members that are elected and bring their own unique overt or covert bias right along with them. Unfortunately for TN, we are in the news AGAIN, for all the wrong reasons!

Parents yelling at and threatening public school board members in Franklin was bad enough. Now in a vote of 10-0, McMinn County members voted to ban an 8th Grade book on the Holocaust … on Holocaust Remembrance Day. But at least we’re not alone in our book banning.

“GOP politicians across the country have sought to emulate Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s successful campaign focus last year on “parental control” of education, which revived calls to ban Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize-winning “Beloved.” In November, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) ordered a statewide probe of potential “criminal activity” into “pornography” in schools after two LGBTQ memoirs were pulled from some districts in his state. Around the same time in Kansas, a school board near Wichita announced it was removing 29 books from circulation, including Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.,” a history of the white supremacist group.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/01/27/maus-ban-tennessee-mcminn-county-holocaust/

The Rocker was in 8th Grade when he wrote a compelling essay on censorship. Thirteen year olds are smarter than we think, and in NJ, teaching middle-schoolers about the Holocaust is a requirement in the curriculum. Like teaching Math, there are actually right and wrong answers and parents mostly left that up to the teachers. I was never asked to opine about books that were purchased at my son’s school, not as a parent or a board member.

The banning of books in our public schools sets a dangerous precedent. At its best, It’s unfortunate that todays’ conservatives think it’s better not to discomfort our children; didn’t they accuse us of being soft, snowflakes? There is nothing humorous about what’s going on in certain states.

I’m going to buy the Pulitzer Prize winning book Maus, and donate it to our local free library so children can read it. Maybe we can start something? https://www.parnassusbooks.net/book/9780394747231

The Rocker’s 8th grade school picture on my desk

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Grandparents Gone Wild

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on November 4, 2021| Leave a Comment »

This week, we ate lunch inside a coffee shop! The Frothy Monkey is a Nashville staple, so I went big and ordered a rosemary latte to go with my avo toast. We were surrounded by 20-somethings on laptops, all socially distanced under a soaring ceiling. All mask-less. We felt like we were living on the edge – this was only the second time we tried eating within a restaurant, not just taking-out or dining en plein air, in 20 months.

It’s been 10 days since we received the Moderna booster. Although I was a bit achy, Bob felt fine, except for the thrashing the Democrats took on Tuesday. Our two beloved states, New Jersey and Virginia. NJ, the place where we fell in love, and VA the place where we built our first home and I started this blog looking out at the Blue Ridge. I couldn’t watch the returns, but we called Cousin Anita in Richmond to get the inside scoop.

It would seem McAuliffe misspoke, or maybe he just told the truth, and that’s what tanked him. He basically said that parents don’t write the curriculum, schools do…. which is true. Have you ever written a semester course on biosynthesis? But the spin from his opponent was all about parental control.

“During an appearance on Meet the Press Sunday morning, Democratic Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe claimed that his statement at a recent debate against Republican opponent Glenn Youngkin that parents shouldn’t be involved in their children’s school curriculum received applause and support. When host Chuck Todd steered the discussion to parents objecting to inappropriate and politicized assigned books and materials, McAuliffe defended his comment at the debate, in which he said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

https://www.yahoo.com/now/mcauliffe-claims-everybody-clapped-argued-172127281.html

He doubled down.

When I first attended a school board meeting in NJ, I made the mistake of raising my hand. Little did I know that when you raise your hand, you get the job. I had something to say about their health classes, and it wasn’t good. If you know me, you know I didn’t mind them teaching my kids about birth control; the problem was what they weren’t teaching. They’d had no instruction on substance abuse and addiction. And I remember the look of bewilderment on the school board members’ faces, you know they had paid for some “Say No to Drugs” suitcase right, filled with materials…. and I said that may be true but my kids haven’t heard one iota…

until the board president said,”Oh, so you mean you want parents to be partners with us?”

I get where Terry McAuliffe was coming from, I really do. You don’t want parents to dictate a course on the Christian Bible in a public school, or to demand that their kids NOT wear a mask in the middle of a global pandemic. You don’t want parents threatening school board members. Thirty years ago, if a parent objected to a health class section dealing with birth control, they could opt their kids out. That little paper was among the hundreds of “first day of school papers,’ like the one giving the school permission to take their children on field trips.

But what the Republicans did in this last election is unconscionable. They want to ban a book by Toni Morrison. They took a college-level class about Critical Race Theory (CRT), and whipped up racist sentiment. They’d like to keep the Confederate Myth alive. The GOP would not want schools to write their own history curriculum – the party of ‘states rights’ promised parents that they were in control, that learning about slavery isn’t age-appropriate. Although every middle school curriculum includes a Holocaust segment

CRT is a non-existent, non-starter, Trojan horse of a curriculum that doesn’t even exist in elementary schools. Surprise, they made it up. The party that lies together under their orange leader, may just take back some power.

It’s time for that Blue Wave to get smart and start fighting. Voting rights and our entire planet are on the line; enough about so-called social issues and sports and bathrooms. This is an old playbook, distract and defend. We need a hero or a shero right about now, before our slide into authoritarianism is complete.

These wild and crazy days deserve discipline and courage! Bob and I are planning to go to our first movie next week in almost two years! Probably a matinee, but still. And in better breaking news, the Grands will get their first Covid vaccine this weekend. Are they too young to see the new Bond “No Time to Die” film in surround sound and technicolor?

Baby Yoda

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Semantically Speaking

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 11, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Another pundit bites the dust. Jeffrey Lord, a Mr T defender on many CNN shows, has had his contract with the network terminated. I would usually turn the channel whenever his smugly leering mug appeared because he always seemed to me insincere. Nothing worse than a reluctant ideologue. And guess what he said – in a Twitter tirade no less – to Angelo Carusone, the President of Media Matters for America?

“Sieg Heil!” 

“Nazi salutes are indefensible,” a CNN spokesperson said in a statement. “Jeffrey Lord is no longer with the network.” https://www.washingtonpost.com

This particular German phrase is banned in Germany. You can’t put air quotes around these two words and pretend you don’t know what they mean. In English the phrase means “Hail Victory;” in reality, it goes along with the Holocaust and an arm in the air and black shirts.

Kayleigh McEnany, another Mr T media consultant left CNN recently. She is now the RNC’s spokesperson, working for Mr T’s very own network. You can’t make this stuff up, in fact I wish I was making it all up.

Let’s skip over to Google shall we. James Damore, an engineer wrote some of his thoughts in a company memo on the reason we see nearly 75% more men in the tech industry and in leadership positions, and then he got sacked. His words of choice were “Biological Differences,”  which seems pretty tame on the surface. After all, we women are the ones giving birth and nursing if we so choose. That can sometimes put a dent in a woman’s career.

But we are not back in the 60s when women could be asked if they planned on having children in a job interview. On a deeper level, Damore was implying we’re not FIT for such complicated, intellectually stimulating and challenging work. Remember, initially we didn’t have women astronauts because of that little “time of the month” problem. No, it’s actually 2017 and young girls are encouraged to pursue Stem careers (science, technology, engineering and maths) – just ask my niece Lynn!

But I have to admit that censorship of any kind scares me. In fact, the ACLU is taking up the case of Milo Yiannopoulos’s free speech rights. He is that ex-Brietbart editor who was drummed out of speaking at a California campus, a British citizen who is ‘dedicated to the destruction of political correctness,’ an alt-right agitator extraordinaire. The Washington, DC Metro removed Yiannopoulos’s ads on their trains for his new book…now a train system is a utility and I guess they don’t have the right to discriminate. Right?

And believe it or not, I’m glad the ACLU is doing what it’s supposed to be doing – protecting our rights! When “Hate Speech” collides with “Free Speech” we have a fundamental question that speaks directly to our democracy and may end up at the feet of the Supreme Court. This is an essential thing that differentiates us among many nations, we don’t ban words or burn books, our only admonition is not to yell “Fire” in a big, crowded public room.

Yesterday I spent much of my time pointing out to a certain two year old, who loves his new Superman cape, we need to use our “inside voices.” We teach our children about tone and decibel levels effortlessly, we want them to grow up in a civilized world. Unfortunately, we have a President who needs someone to manage his Twitter speech, to explain to him it’s like yelling “FIRE” at North Korea, in an “OUTSIDE” voice.

This was my view yesterday morning on my way to the Zoo. Nashville has sent out the Bat Signal because we need a hero!

IMG_1063

 

 

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Lovely Leo

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , on August 1, 2013| 2 Comments »

While surfing the worldwide web this morning, I clicked on a Rolling Stone’s article about the best live bands, “50 Greatest Live Acts Right Now.” I think I found this via Facebook. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/50-greatest-live-acts-right-now-20130731

Naturally, one of the best was the Parlor Mob. http://www.disarraymagazine.com/2012/03/live-review-parlor-mob-rocks-house-of.html Alright so I’m prejudiced. Since they parted ways, I hear from my Lovely Leo birthday boy what each band member is up to; who they are playing with, flying off to Sweden with, getting married to…  Aside from scoring films, the Rocker is currently playing with 2 bands:

Sikamor Rooney http://sikamorrooney.bigcartel.com/products and

the Black Jesuses http://blackjesuses.com – http://www.surfingmagazine.com/sounds/sounds-the-black-jesus/

Because music is a part of his DNA. But he is also a writer, writing all of the lyrics to his music today. And I thought back to a time in middle school, when he wrote an exceptional essay on censorship. We were proud that at such a young age, he could feel so passionately about artistic freedom.

So with some sense of danger, I sought out the latest edition of Rolling Stone magazine. Because it’s not OK with me when drugstores try to limit my access to a magazine. I found it surreptitiously bundled in front of the very last cashier at our local Barnes and Noble, not in its usual spot among all the other magazine racks. And somehow the cashier gave off a sinister vibe, or maybe it was me, like I was purchasing contraband. photo

And the article about the Boston Bomber was compelling and answered many questions we’ve all been asking, like how can such a normal looking kid, a kid who was in college and became a citizen last year, become a monster? I know in today’s world that magazine article was a click away, but in a small way, I was making a point. And now we hear that the magazine doubled their news stand sales this month…so you see censors, some things have unintended consequences.

You may not agree with me, but lucky for us we live in a country where writers can speak the truth not only to power, but to the world.

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