Protective as banning a well written novel with sexual and racial contents is, I don’t see the point. The truth is, protecting an innocent mind will only make it more fragile. If banning proceeds, and works, our society will eventually turn into something close to what Vonnegut described in Harrison Bergeron.
Just imagine yourself living in a fair world where no one is better than you. One day, you decided to read an old book that you found buried in your back yard. You flipped through the first few pages and got hooked. At first you felt sorry for Weary for not looking as good as the others, then you started to pity this really pathetic character called Billy. Suddenly, you got to the part where Vonnegut described Billy during the war and had a heart attack. You died, mainly because you can’t accept the fact that everyone’s different.
Perhaps it’s time to tell governments to stop deciding what their populace can read and what they can’t. I believe we that we are all mature enough to decide what we want to read. If one can’t handle Vonnegut’s humor, he or she can decide to put the book down, not the government. Even if a little kid flip through Slaughterhouse-Five, his/her mind is likely to be too innocent to comprehend such materials. Perhaps we should take our own immune system for example so I can buttress my point a bit more. Half dead swine flu cells are injected into our bodies so our immunity can defend the disease. Children are allowed to play with sand so germs can get into them and their white blood cells can produce anti-bodies. Normal parents wouldn’t tell their kids to stay away from the sand so the germs won’t get into them, would they? So, why Slaughterhouse-Five would be banned?
A novel like Slaughterhouse-Five is likely not going to offend a sensible reader. It is an anti-war book where the American writer occasionally throws in a few racial pieces on Americans. I admitted that the sexual content might provoke some actions among parents, but sex-ed starts around grade 2 in most schools and that’s at least a year or two before the kids can fully grasp the details in Slaughterhouse-Five.
If Slaughterhouse-Five ever provokes a young, delicate mind, it is doing the mind a favor.
Nancy
Poo-tee-wee
I liked the swine-flu shot analogy. While certain media might be much more shocking and therefore require more censorship, literature requires a certain amount of imagination. Shocking images and statements without context, pose threats. But writing about real issues inside of a relevant context might not be as harmful.
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