I'M ALL FOR BURNING BOOKS (AND SO ARE YOU)
You read that right. I’m all for burning books, as I'm pretty sure you are. Just because you can conjure a pithy line you heard in a film or picked up from someone on social media doesn’t make that sentiment true. Yes, there was most certainly a time when books were precious items and libraries temples celebrating and preserving the world’s culture and collective wisdom. And, yes, in that context destroying a book or a library, god forbid, could easily be interpreted as a truly evil act. Agreed. But that’s not the world we live in and it hasn’t been for a long time. More than that, what's abhorrent about the book burning examples we typically reference is less the destruction of those texts than the targeting and removal of specific voices from society. And far worse still than an example in which burned books were available, read, and beloved for a century would be a state in which certain people (particularly if selected solely on the basis of their faith or immutable characteristics) have their works censored from the start or are never permitted to be published in the first place. To me, all that seems obvious.
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