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Another Opinion
The nexus of two recent headlines, one detailing yet another school shooting, the other profiling the reaction to a book banner who was appointed to oversee Nebraska’s libraries, reminded me of what comedian Wanda Sykes once said: “Until a drag queen walks into a school and beats eight kids to death with a copy of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ we’re paying attention to the wrong stuff.” (I cleaned it up a little.)
None of which is funny. For starters, Gov. Jim Pillen has appointed Terri Cunningham- Swanson, a former Plattsmouth school board member, to the Nebraska Library Board, dissing 1,649 Plattsmouthians who voted to remove her from the local board for endless book challenges. That’s dissing with a capital D, underlined, bolded, all caps and set off with a series of asterisks.
For the full disrespect picture, go ahead and throw in the thousands of Nebraskans who see both the damage in and folly of an ongoing assault on the maintenance of a rich and diverse literary canon available to the state’s public school students.
Pillen was not the first to imperil book titles with a Nebraska Library Commission board member. His predecessor, former Gov. Pete Ricketts, appointed Tiffany Carter, whose bona fides were honed in the world of book challenges, which, as has been widely reported, often comes from concerned parents who have not bothered to read the book, only what they consider offending passages. The metaphor seems obvious, but doing all the homework might be a good start to make a case for a challenge.
Plus, no one is asking third graders to read “Myra Breckinridge” nor high school English classes to parse the writings of Masters and Johnson. Most Nebraska schools have policies in place for parents to opt their kids out of lessons or books without telling other parents what their kids should be reading — the hallmark of challenges with banning the ultimate aim.
Nevertheless, having a couple library commission board members with less trust in the professional librarians and experienced teachers across our state than a posse of excerpting book challengers should give us pause.
Books and guns. To Sykes’ point, our focus on restricting or removing the former diffuses the attention we should be paying to the latter and the wake of terror that guns leave when they show up in schools.
Which brings us to the most recent school shooting, the ongoing social distemper that presidential candidate Donald Trump wants us to “get over it” and “move on.” (Of course, he also told a crowd at a rally last week that schools are performing sex change operations, so there you go.)
In an equally callous rendering of the truth, his running mate, J.D. Vance, considers school shootings a “fact of life.”
The sun rising in the East and gravity are facts of life. Change being inevitable and growth being optional are facts of life. The verity of measuring twice and cutting once is a fact of life.
Students and teachers dying in schools at the hands of shooters wielding easily accessible weapons of war, which sometimes are Christmas gifts, is not a fact of life; it is a fact of death and death only, searing traumas for the loved ones of those who bleed out in classrooms, hallways and libraries.
Those left to grieve them may learn to live with that pain, but telling someone to get over it heals no one.
Such nonsense is the same thinking that believes we should further harden schools rather than deal with the threat.
The same thinking that insists the problem is mental illness but then justifies a vote against measures to strengthen mental health programs in schools. The same thinking that lawfully arms the too young, the wholly unstable and the historically violent with guns designed for the battlefield, leaving the rest of us with thoughts and prayers: Thinking about being in the wrong place at the wrong time -—math class on a regular school day or the produce aisle at a grocery store or the food court at a local mall — and praying we survive when the bullets come. Are we OK with living like this? OK sending our children to school each morning knowing that since Columbine, in 1999, our kids have been in someone’s crosshairs 417 times? Those horrors work out on average to more than one school shooting a month for a quarter century.
Are we OK with that? If not, we should spend less time challenging books and more time challenging those standing in the way of a solution to school shootings.
George Ayoub filed nearly 5,000 columns, editorials and features in 21 years as a journalist for the Grand Island Independent. His columns also appeared in the Omaha World-Herald and Kearney Hub.
