The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Lately I’ve been noticing a new drumbeat from the far right, the Red States, the Christian jihad and yellers at PTA meetings across this great land. They want books banned. They don’t want our kids exposed to the woke culture, nothing about sex or sexual preferences, nothing about systemic racism or sexism, nothing that would make them feel uncomfortable knowing certain truths, even the ones self-evident. They would close down the libraries and in some places they’re working on that. They want to shut down the Department of Education. If they could, they’d burn books and maybe even the librarians who dare to allow material these parents object to placed on the shelves.

What I don’t understand is how these people think the real danger to their offspring is in the library. Go ahead, shut down the library, lock the librarians up, burn the objectionable books, that should protect Johnny and Brittany, shouldn’t it? Nearly every kid has a smart phone, nearly every kid has access to the same social media as their folks, nearly every kid can watch violence and porn at the earliest possible age. But hey, the parents think banning a couple of books in their local or school library will buffer their darlings from left wing woke propaganda? The unwoke need to wake the hell up. Their kids’ brains are being groomed all right, but not from some novel about growing up gay in America.

Social media and the internet provide them with creepy bullies, trolls that destroy their developing self-esteem, conspiracy theories, whacked politics, a world of Likes and Unfriending, all guaranteed to warp their childhoods in favor of an immature and puerile adulthood. Parents worry about critical race theory and prefer that to critical thinking. They think their kids, protected from the bogeyman of Hollywood or Disney or Bud Light, will grow up with their values, as if they were Amish and driving the horse and buggy would save them from being assimilated into a decadent culture, the one that surrounds them completely.

Too late, too damn late to ban the books and prosecute the librarians, the Pied Piper of the internet has already stolen their children.

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We got a little library down here at the notoriously (but proudly) illiterate South End. One of those 1960 phone booths landed in the park I care-take across the island about a year ago so I decided it would be easier to make something interesting with it than try to haul it to the dump. We turned it into a Little Library, built bookshelves and stocked it with fiction and non-fiction, even some CD’s. A week later vandals pulled the bookcase out, scattered the books, burned a few, tossed some in the woods and painted graffiti on the glass walls of the booth. Sure, I was bummed, but since I was married to a librarian, I decided to rise above the obvious desecration of literary values and try again. To that end I posted alien robots to guard the sanctuary.

Yesterday I drove by and noticed through the windows the bookshelves were gone so I pulled into the parking lot only to find the entire library, books and bookcase, scattered on the ground and left in the rain, ruined. It’s not like the burning of the Library of Alexandria exactly or even like our own evangelical book burnings, more like a senseless attack on anything intellectual or bureaucratic. Although, to be honest, it’s probably just a couple of kids who think it’s funny to destroy things. You see it all the time, not just on the South End, but it’s epidemic on the internet. Ransacking a little library is probably just our way of trolling down here.

Obviously I underestimated the intelligence of our potential Vandals. It only took them one year to recognize the alien security guards as harmless sculptures. Sure, we could bring in surveillance cameras, hire some security, lock the library up at night, set up lending hours. But … let’s be honest here. Maybe the South End isn’t ready for culture just yet. It might be better to bow to the public, acknowledge their mistrust of books and art, maybe just use the phone booth for a private vaping salon. That, or patiently wait for our hoodlums to grow dumber since pretty obviously they’re not interested in learning much of anything. Couple more years on drugs then we can try the alien robot guards again. Third time, they say, is the charm.

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