Editorial by John Estridge
Let me preface this by saying the obvious for anyone who knows me or has read anything I have written: I don’t know a lot about anything.
But I know a little about a lot.
One of the things I have had in my cluttered, amusement-park-of-a-mind for quite a number of years is Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are a lot alike.
I know. The kneejerk reaction to that statement is to begin to try to find open mental institutions and give that information to my Long Suffering Wife Ruth. Let me save you the trouble, because she already would have them on speed dial if either of us knew how to set that up.
But hear me out, because I want to show my reasoning on that to get to what I really want to say about five hours and 2 million words from now.
In my lifetime, they are the only two presidential candidates who have really meant what they said on the campaign trail. Others, all the others in my opinion, make soundbite promises to whatever crowd they are talking to and have no intentions of fulfilling any of those promises.
Say what you will about Trump: He did what he promised or attempted to do what he promised.
And I firmly believe Bernie would have done exactly as he promised or at least attempted to do what he promised. I think that is what inspired many of the people who believe them and are dedicated to them and their messages.
Everyone else I believe just wanted the job, the title, and would say and do anything to get it. And then do everything safe and milquetoast as the rest of the stiffs, I mean presidents and politicians, I have witnessed.
And the reason I am going through all of this is to show they come from the different poles of what today influences our lives to a terrible degree: liberals and conservatives.
As I believe Bernie and Trump are very similar, I also believe book banning and the current climate of not allowing alternative points of view are very similar except they come from the different ideological poles. Book banning comes from mostly conservatives and limiting points of views from largely the liberals.
Both are destroying our wonderful country’s raison d’etre, free speech. And both of these topics raise my blood pressure. And they both have many like qualities, which for me is the pervasive slippery slope.
Let’s do one at a time. Since I recently had the greatest job of my life, which was working at the library, let’s go with book banning first. Usually, it is the conservatives who call for banning books for many different reasons, with language and sexual situations being the most popular reasons. But as we shall see, sometimes the banning comes from the liberals.
Two novels helped form my love of reading and writing while I was a young person. They are: Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies. Kind of surprisingly, I read the latter while I was still in grade school. I would not recommend that, but my OLDEST sister Linda read that book for an English class at IU East when it met at Earlham College. So, that was a long time ago. I found the paperback sitting around and began to read it.
No one at the house stopped me saying “oh dear God there are bad things in it.” Instead, I just read it, and Linda and I talked about it. To this day, I like to think I helped Linda with her paper. It was the book that introduced me to symbolism, and I got the symbolism in that right away. I really enjoyed those times getting to talk to my sister about that. She is 10 years OLDER than me, so we did not have a lot in common, but we bonded talking about that book. It was banned due to language and sexual situations. And with that book, I graduated to reading different kinds of books that expanded my world beyond Liberty, Indiana.
My sister, Karen, the seemingly adopted child, then told me about Catcher in the Rye. Any talk about banned books shock me but banning Catcher in the Rye is beyond me. It was and is a delightful book. It is funny and sad and yes it has sexual situations and bad language, but it is the quintessential coming-of-age book. Those things sometimes happen as people go through their transition years from children to adults. It is life. Literature should be about life. And students should be able to read books by great authors.
My favorite novel of all time is Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. It is a book I have read about six times. I read it whenever I feel I need to revitalize the creative juices. It is a fictionalized account about Joseph Heller’s World War II experience as a bombardier based out of Italy. It is very funny and is an anti-war classic.
It has been banned for being subversive and sexual situations and bad language. Again, it is a war with young men being involved so there will be sexual situations and bad language. And saying it is subversive is very subjective. I am against war, but I believe there are times wars have to be fought. If I had been alive during World War II, I would have supported that war, but I think all human beings should be against war. To say war is brutal is understating it to the nth degree as the goal is to kill more of them than they kill us. Heller’s character Yossarian says on more than one occasion, he does not want to fly because the people on the ground are trying to kill him.
War should be a very last resort as it was in WW II.
And back to the language reason. I wrote a short story for high school English my junior year while at Union County High School. My teacher was an old maid, and I thought she was very conservative. My story included people my age at that time, and I had conversations quoted in the story. I did not get an A, and she wrote on the paper that the language was not realistic to what today’s (1970s) teenagers use. After the other students left the classroom, I told her I thought I would get in trouble for using real language. She told me never to write with constrictions like that but to write realistically in everything.
But if I had done that, it would probably be banned by someone.
Another one of my favorites that is among the banned books is Huckleberry Finn, written by the immortal Mark Twain.
Originally, it was banned because librarians did not like Twain’s use of dialect from the mid Nineteenth Century saying it was only suitable for the slums. Of course, it was the dialect from mid 1800s and from that part of the country it was set in.
Now, it is banned because of its perceived racist connotations with the use of a racial slur some 200 times and the description of the antebellum south: “use of a racial slur and its depictions of racist attitudes can cause students to feel upset, marginalized, or humiliated and can create an uncomfortable atmosphere in the classroom.”
That is from The List. And the article notes it is the liberals who want to ban Huckleberry Finn in today’s world. Like his use of dialect that made librarians cringe, the use of the racial slur and the depiction of the antebellum south was from the mid-1800s not from 2022.
Thus, that will let us transcend to my other topic: the end of free speech because of the liberals.
There are many examples of this.
Emma Camp, a senior at that time at the University of Virginia, wrote an essay for the liberal-leaning New York Times during the spring of this year. It is about the stifling of free speech at our colleges and universities. If one gets a chance, Google that and have a read.
She talks about having to have guarded conversations with professors and students concerning what was once debatable issues. But now, if someone voices an opinion that is not in line with the liberal-leaning majorities in academia today, they are ostracized and fired, if they are professors, and forced to leave their choices of learning institutions if they are students.
This is some of her essay:
“I went to college to learn from my professors and peers. I welcomed an environment that champions intellectual diversity and rigorous disagreement. Instead, my college experience has been defined by strict ideological conformity. Students of all political persuasions hold back — in class discussions, in friendly conversations, on social media — from saying what we really think. Even as a liberal who has attended abortion rights demonstrations and written about standing up to racism, I sometimes feel afraid to fully speak my mind.
“In the classroom, backlash for unpopular opinions is so commonplace that many students have stopped voicing them, sometimes fearing lower grades if they don’t censor themselves. According to a 2021 survey administered by College Pulse of over 37,000 students at 159 colleges, 80 percent of students self-censor at least some of the time. Forty-eight percent of undergraduate students described themselves as ‘somewhat uncomfortable’ or ‘very uncomfortable’ with expressing their views on a controversial topic in the classroom. At U.Va., 57 percent of those surveyed feel that way.”
Back in another century when I was a college student, debate was the center piece. I went to listen to diverse groups like the Irish Republican Army and Crusade for Christ to hear what they had to say.
There were others. Many of those speaking I did not agree with, but never would I stifle their right to say what they want.
Within classrooms during that time, we debated vigorously about different subjects. It was fun and insightful.
When I was that age, I considered myself a long-haired liberal. Like-minded liberals championed free speech because we were talking against what we perceived as the establishment. Now liberals seemingly do not want debate but to force their views and only their views on all of us.
We have fought so many wars to have the right to free speech. That was one of the cornerstones of the American Revolution, free speech. It was unheard of in the entire world until our Revolution’s aftermath, the birth of this nation.
Men and women have paid with their lives and their blood for free speech. And now we are losing it from within without a shot being fired.
Again, this is both extremes causing a lack of freedom for the majority of us in the middle. It is time to take back our country from those at the two opposite ideological poles.
I wanted to write this while I still can.
