Rediscover Communication

well... the issue of censorship is a touchy one... I looked at the link, and read the list of the most commonly banned books in the 90's. I was surprised how many books that I have personlly read have been banned in some form or another. I do have to say, however, the #1 book was Impressions, which was a reading curriculum for 5th and 6th graders at my elementary school in Fairbanks, was truly SCREWED UP. Kids had no business reading it, and it was of very questionable taste for adults. It was only there for one year (my 5th grade year) and then it was taken out and replaced when something like 30-40 percent of the school district disappeared because all the parents pulled their kids out of public school and did homeschool (which was much more common there than here). There was a huge public outcry. Huge enough to cause financial problems for the school district. Believe me, that particular book deserved to be banned. There were sections on Occult spells, Transcendental Meditation, as well as some very twisted stories... One I particularly remember was titled "more" where all the kids were sitting in this auditorium and there was some kind of meeting and everyone was in a frenzy... the group became more and more frenzied over something (I can't remember exactly what) and finally they were killing people here and there throughout the auditorium. It said that "someone began to roll heads down the aisle and everyone cried 'more, more, MORE!'". This is first hand experience, because I remember all the fuss and I wanted to see for myself what the deal was. I stole a book from school and brought it home and read the stuff that we didn't read in class (proponents picked the tamer stories so that kids wouldn't run home and tell mommy what they learned in school that day). Trust me, it was messed up. That was the real exception to the list, though.

But most of the rest are just an example of political correctness gone horribly wrong. Books like "Huck Finn" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" were banned because of the racial overtones in them. I just counted down the list and of the 50, I have read 11. Have heard of about 5-6 more. The surprising one was "A wrinkle in Time" because that was one of my favorite stories as a kid. Basically, there are a couple of groups that have been responsible for banning books, and surprisingly, they have been on opposite sides of the political spectrum. There are the puritan mommies who don't want to pollute baby's mind with things they don't understand themselves (ban "A Wrinkle in Time because they just didn't get it) or expose them to emotionally stressful stuff (Ban "bridge to Terebithia" because it dealt with death and dying). The other side is the racially sensitive (anybody, no matter what race, can be this way) crowd that doesn't want to expose young constituents to the word "nigger".

Anyhow, I agree with a lot of what you said... Some select few books should be taken out of the hands of little kids if it is stuff that is OBVIOUSLY not good for them (such as Impressions, Playboy and Bon Jovi records), but once a person is of age, they should be encouraged to read some of these on the list. "Catcher", "Mockingbird", "Wrinkle in Time", etc.
And you are correct about the average John Doe. I think that some of this comes from an informational overload that we as americans experience. Every day we are hit by literally thousands of messages and viewpoints demanding our attention, and I think we have reached a saturation point, which is we don't really care about anything anymore. Or at least we only really care about a small number of things. It finally comes down to choosing things to care about. To each of us, the things we care about are important, because we care about them or they wouldn't be important. It becomes very circular. And there is no way to care about everything, at all times equally. People like that are observed to be caring about nothing at all, because their care is spread so thinly that you can't detect it.
So, I don't know what the solution is... To each of us everybody else is sheeple.
I don't know if there is a way around that...
I have to go... I will write more later tonight...