“Banned Books Week”: An Opinion on Censorship

Stephen Chbosky once said, “Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.”

Chbosky is the author of a popular young adult novel titled, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” which happens to be ten on the list of 100 most banned books from the early 2000s, according to the American Library Association.

He, along with many authors, have been tormented for their books that go against what many say is morally correct.

This week, from Sept. 25 to Oct. 1, is Banned Books Week, which was made to bring awareness to the thousands of books that have been challenged, and almost completely banned in the United States.

According to the Banned Books Week Coalition, which describes itself as “a national alliance of diverse organizations joined by a commitment to increase awareness of the annual celebration of the freedom to read,” this week was started in 1982 in response to a sudden surge of banning books.

As a bibliophile myself, I suspected that this was not the case anymore, and that, perhaps, challenging books was old news because our country seems to have grown more open-minded to new, progressive ideas.

But, I was surprised to find that, since 1982, 11,300 books have been challenged, according to the American Library Association.

This number makes my heart sink. Because when a book is challenged, the person does not “simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others,” according to the American Library Association.

That means that 11,300 books were almost taken away from Americans, most commonly due to offensive language or sexual content. 

This whole idea of banning and challenging books goes back to censorship, a concept that has a pretty cover, but a murky inside. The idea of protection is powerful, and in some cases, needed. But when we take away books, especially ones that bring up powerful ideas, are we really protecting anyone?

When someone is so sheltered from the world around them, how will they survive when those ideas are in front of them? Books can give us an inside look into the world, without being directly thrown into it.

I believe books are truly that powerful, where a deeper understanding of the world can be formed because of them. Books are magnificent difference makers. Books are advisors. Books are fighters. Books are advocates.

The funny thing is, it was a book that taught me about the power that books have on others.

When I was a freshman, my class read the novel “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury. To this day, I can’t forget the words that Guy Montag, the protagonist, said: “There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”

Montag lived in a society where books were burned, because of the content that might tarnish the uniform society in which the people lived. He didn’t just live in it though. He was one of the firefighters that actually burned the books.

Then, one day, Montag goes into a house where a woman will not leave her books. She will not leave, even though the whole house is about to be burned down, leaving her to die.

The question he asks himself is, why would a woman risk her life for a bunch of books?

I believe that I asked myself that same question while I was reading that book, because the idea of a woman being so brave as to stand by those books, even when a fire was about to burn through them, was just so powerful.

The reality is, though, that in a society where the ideas that come from books are being burned away like they mean almost nothing, how could you not want to stand by the beautiful, magnificent ideas expressed in books?

Going back to what Stephen Chbosky said, do we really want to take away our right to speak, listen or see?

For me, books taught me to climb mountains, travel to Alaska fight in televised death games stick it to the man and understand people’s sorrows.

But it’s not just the deep emotional ties that books bring to readers. No, it’s also the basic freedom that we reserve as Americans in the first amendment to freedom of speech.

If we ban books, we are taking away the right that we have reserved since 1788, the year in which the Amercian Constitution was signed.

Over 200 years ago, the American Consitution was the thing that allowed us to freely speak.

Taking away books is something that basically says, “no, you can’t see new opinions; no, you can’t see something that might be bad,” but when anyone in this sad world watches the news or reads the papers, you will most likely see something close to or even worse from what you read in books.

Banning and challenging books must stop. And that is what this week is trying to express, that every book, no matter how inappropriate or awfully written, deserves a chance to be read, because it is a freedom that allows us to speak, listen and see all that we choose.

We, the youthful generation, can stop this. We can bring awareness to the freedoms that we deserve as readers and highlight all that reading does for people.

And it can start with us, today.