This column will be banned

By Jeffrey R. DeRego
HippoPress.com

I like music, always have. The first record album I ever owned was “Kiss: Rock and Roll Over.” My mom gave it to me along with a small, red record player. I listened to that album until the grooves were gone. I was five years old.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, since it is an election year, calls for censorship (disguised as a uniform rating system for television, film, video games, and music) echo across all of the United States. Cutting off access to ideas that many people find distasteful is always done for the good of America’s children. Protecting them from images and sounds that may disturb them is a noble idea, but it’s wrong.

My father taught me to read when I was three years old. He chose to teach me through the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, specifically “The Cask of Amontillado.”

This week the Londonderry school board listened to a parental argument concerning the book "The Goats" by Brock Cole, and its place on the middle school reading list. The charge against the book is that it presents ideas and situations that are inappropriate for children of middle school age, and therefore it should not be on the reading list in middle school classrooms. For those of you unfamiliar with the book, it concerns two 13-year-old children who are stripped of their clothes and marooned on a place called Goat Island for one night during summer camp.

This is only one in a string of curriculum challenges throughout New Hampshire and the rest of the United States.

Um... Is anyone taking notice of this yet?

It bothers me that we adults have such low regard for the intelligence of our children. At what point do we assume they can make decisions about what they want to see, or hear, or read? How does reading about evolution turn a child into Charles Manson, and for that matter, how does listening to Marilyn Manson turn a child into Charles Manson?

It doesn’t. Media is what the viewer or listener makes of it, and that is all. If parents are unable, unwilling, or unavailable to answer the questions that their children have, blaming the school system, Darwin, or Eminem for unacceptable behavior is like blaming the coffee table because the toast burned.

If the case is that media violence causes real-world violence, then wouldn’t there be a lot more real world violence? Wouldn’t it be unsafe to step outdoors, even just to get the mail?

Admittedly, there are many neighborhoods where that is the case, but economics has much more to do with it than anything on television. Perhaps we should explain to children that the distribution of wealth in today’s America favors the rich, and puts a higher value on their lives. It would certainly do more for them then taking away an Ice-T or NWA CD.

Helping kids to understand the hows and whys of our complex society requires more thought and action than banning a book, or two, or twenty, or all of them. It requires maturity and commitment.

Who knows, you might even read with them, and learn that they have likes and dislikes too, that the do not like being thought of as pets, or remote controlled sports figures. Perhaps you will learns that they are alive, and questioning, and want to know why things are the way they are.

Because children know that in the future, when they have to make hard choices, they will only have their own experiences from which to draw.

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