There’s nothing funny about this news • Nebraska Examiner
The connection between two recent headlines, one detailing another school shooting and the other describing the reaction to a banner being appointed to oversee a Nebraska library, reminded me of comedian Wanda Say Max 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 focusing on the wrong things.” (I cleaned it up a bit. .)
None of this is funny.
First, Gov. Jim Pillen appointed former Plattsmouth School Board member Terri Cunningham-Swanson to the Nebraska Library Board. Angry at the 1,649 Plattsmouthites who voted to remove her from the local board over endless book challenges. This is different from capital D, underline, bold, all caps and separated by a series of asterisks.
For a picture that is utterly disrespectful, keep in mind the thousands of Nebraskans who see the damage and stupidity caused by the ongoing assault on the rich and diverse literary canon of students in the state’s public schools.
Pillen is not the first person to join with members of the Nebraska Library Commission board of directors to jeopardize a book title. His predecessor, former Gov. Pete Ricketts, appointed Tiffany Carter, whose bona fides were honed in the world of book challenges, as has been widely reported That way, these challenges often come from worried parents who are too lazy to read the book and only read what they like. This analogy may seem obvious, but doing all your homework can be a good start to taking on the challenge.
Besides, no one asks third graders to read “Myra Breckinridge,” or high school English classes to parse the works of Masters and Johnson. Most Nebraska schools have policies that require parents to opt out of classes or books for their children without telling other parents what their children should read — a sign of challenges to the end goal of prohibition.
Still, the fact that several library committee board members have less faith in our state’s professional librarians and experienced teachers than a group of excerpt book challengers should give us pause.
Books and guns. In Sykes’ view, our focus on limiting or eliminating the former distracts from the latter and the horror left behind when guns appear in schools.
This reminds us of the recent school shootings, and presidential candidate Donald Trump wants us to “get over it” and “move on.” (Of course, he also told a crowd at an assembly last week that sex-reassignment surgeries are underway at the school, so there’s that.)
His running mate, J.D. Vance, described school shootings as “a fact of life” in a similarly grim tone.
The sun rises in the east and gravity is a fact of life. Change is inevitable, growth is optional, it’s a fact of life. Measure twice and cut once is a fact of life.
Students and teachers in schools die at the hands of gunmen using easily available weapons of war that are sometimes given as Christmas gifts, but that is not a fact of life; it is simply a fact of death, given to those who work in classrooms, hallways and libraries. The loved ones of the bleeding bear the searing trauma. Those left to grieve may learn to live with the pain, but telling someone to get over it doesn’t heal anyone.
This nonsense is the same as the idea that we should further fortify schools rather than address threats. The same thinking insists that the problem is mental illness, but then justifies voting against measures to strengthen mental health programs in schools. The same idea of legally arming the too young, the utterly unstable, and the historically violent with guns designed for the battlefield leaves the rest of us thinking and praying: Thinking about being in the wrong place at the wrong time— A normal school day in math class, the produce aisle at the grocery store, or the food court at the local mall—praying we survive when the bullets come.
Can we accept this kind of life? Do we send our children to school every morning knowing that since Columbine in 1999, our children have been targeted 417 times? For a quarter of a century, these horrific events have averaged more than one school shooting per month.
Do we agree?
If not, we should spend less time challenging the books and more time challenging those who stand in the way of solutions to school shootings.
