” Imagine waking up tomorrow to discover you no longer had a voice. You could no longer express your opinions or ideals, defend your morals or rights and give advice on anything you strongly believe in. Now imagine if you couldn’t express yourself in writing either.”
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Imagine waking up tomorrow to discover you no longer had a voice. You could no longer express your opinions or ideals, defend your morals or rights and give advice on anything you strongly believe in.

Now imagine if you couldn’t express yourself in writing either.

Censorship has been around for quite some time. Movies and television shows have been given ratings to protect children. The only CDs found on a Wal-Mart shelf are edited, and in some public places we can’t talk about God because it interferes with the beliefs of other people.

We live censored lives, and while some censors are there for good reason, we have to wonder how much is too much. Perhaps banning literature has crossed this line.

Every year the American Library Association receives hundreds of challenges to ban books from the shelves of public libraries, schools and other public businesses.

Challenges, while nothing more than a written complaint about a piece of literature, are detrimental to our intellectual health. Many challenge books with the intention to protect their children from material that contains explicit content such as drug references, sexual behavior, the occult, racism and homosexuality.

While parents and many school officials find it necessary to protect their children from such material, and although their intentions might be good, they do not realize that they are destroying freedom of expression.

The ALA made a report of the top ten most frequently challenged books in 2007 and among them was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. It was challenged for the racism in the novel.

I could understand why some might see this as material unsuitable for certain audiences, but is it impossible to understand that racism does exist and, most certainly, was a part of life when the book written? Is it impossible to get past ignorance and understand that Mark Twain wrote about things that he knew and experienced? Had he written his story any other way and decided to exclude the concept of racism, his material would have been extremely out of sync with his time. It would have been unrealistic.

Racism happened, and continues to happen, and yet people try to ignore this fact by banning a book by one of the greatest American authors.

Also among the top ten list: The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. Produced by MTV Books in 1999, Perks dove into the mind of a troubled 15-year-old freshman who viewed the world with a maturity that is alien to most kids his age.

It’s to be expected that drug references, suicide, obscene language and homosexuality would be some of the issues that would be discussed in a coming of age tale, yet it was challenged in an effort to destroy the material.

Are the ones who challenged the book ignorant enough to believe that by banning literature they could protect their children from such issues?

Does society forget what it was like to survive in a world as a teenager? Even if you challenged a book, don’t we have to deal with these important issues daily in other avenues of the media? If one were to actually read Perks they would see into the mind of a teenager and begin to understand how such issues can affect lives at a young age.

The book is profound and it speaks monumentally for those who have gone through such issues. Chbosky, like many other authors, writes his material to change the way people think, and, like any art, it should be given the chance to be interpreted and to be evaluated by anyone who is willing to give it a chance.

In order to defend our freedom of expression, The ALA conducts Banned Books Week during the last week of September.

It hosts a variety of events and offers opportunities for the public to understand the importance of literature.

Banned Books Week promotes ways that we can stand up for intellectual freedom. The ALA states that, intellectual freedom implies a circle, and that circle is broken if either freedom of expression or access to ideas is stifled.

Literature is something sacred. People write things that affect them, and we should respect those who have something intelligent to say about the world.

Literature is designed to provoke the reader, to bring the reader into a world that may or may not be their own and to give them enlightenment and entertainment on subjects that are personal and provocative to the soul.

If classics like Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men and Slaughterhouse Five have been banned and challenged several times in the past hundred years, it makes you wonder to what extreme society will go to in order to create a listless world void of all creativity.

Apparently the Harry Potter series has also been banned. If you ask me, society has simply lost all motivation to give into their imagination.

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