When I was a high school sophomore it was 1963, my favorite year for English. We read Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, and 1984, all on the  ALA Banned Books list.  I had no idea how subversive my English teacher was until I read about Banned Books in graduate school over thirty years later.

The novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding tells of a group of prep school boys crashed on a deserted island in the Pacific. One of them, Jack, tries to establish a rough democratic order on the island, but he is overthrown.Within weeks they become tribes of savages preying on each other. One boy is killed, others forced into hiding. At the end they are rescued by naval officers in a destroyer, out searching for them.

The novel portrays a Darwinian view of human nature. The violence and bullying is undeniable, but totally believable. We were neither shocked nor corrupted by the events of the novel.  We read other dystopian books, but this one was about boys our age and younger.

Our teacher also assigned us a novel by B.F. Skinner, Walden Two, a true utopian novel.   We still believed in the degeneracy of human behavior, because of LOTF, 1984 and Brave New World. 

In an informal poll at the end of the year, we voted Lord of the Flies our favorite book.   I don’t think we were damaged by the year of thinking dangerously. We were certainly challenged to think about human nature. I hardly remember the books I read in any other year of K-12 schooling.

I’m not sure how often Lord of the Flies is taught anymore. In 1992 the book was challenged in Waterloo, Iowa schools because of profanity, lurid passages about sex, and statements defamatory to minorities, God, women, and the disabled. I don’t remember any of that.

One teacher appeared on an interest group in 2024 to say, “I’ve taught this book many times and I’m still struggling to figure out what the “lurid passages about sex” are. Violence for sure, a little profanity, definitely bullying the kid with glasses, but sex? What on earth are they talking about?” Clarissa Cline

Other challenges aimed at the inappropriate portrayal of human nature

• Challenged at the Owen, N.C. High School (1981) because the book is “demoralizing inasmuch as it implies that man is little more than an animal”;
• The novel was challenged at the Olney, Texas, Independent School District in 1984 because of “excessive violence and bad language.”

I suppose some adults in 1982-82 believed teenagers should be protected from that level of barbarism. They would be shocked by what we can easily view on TV today.

• A committee of the Toronto, Canada Board of Education ruled on June 23, 1988, that the novel is “racist and recommended that it be removed from all schools” after parents objected to the book’s use of racial profanity, saying that the novel denigrated Black people, according to the ALA https://www.thoughtco.com/lord-of-the-flies-banned-challenged-740596

Probably the use of the “N” word stirred some of the racial accusations, but I recall those as careless slurs, not a theme of the novel. There were no Black children among the survivors of the crash.

If I taught this book today in high school, I would read the first chapter aloud to my class, and they would be hooked. It is one of the best openings of a novel I’ve read. I hope they wouldn’t watch the movie instead, because it is a poor representation. Thank goodness it wasn’t available in 1963, the year of thinking dangerously.

1984 is so timely that it is the theme of this year’s Banned Books Week.

Censorship Is So 1984 — Read for Your Rights! With the escalation in attempts to ban books in libraries, schools, and bookstores around the country, George Orwell’s cautionary tale 1984 serves a prescient warning about the dangers of censorship.

Banning books is pretty tame amid the tyranny of state of  Oceania in 1984. Yet we are on the threshold of its dark realm of thought control, and we have sighted the Ministry of Truth. See Chapter 1 to see how easily we slip under its spell.

Is it possible it has been over three-quarters of a century since the publication of 1984? The book that once was the forewarning of totalitarianism is now an unfolding plan. George Orwell projected this dystopian nightmare from the psychological techniques of World War II, and he  has become the psychic prophet of the early Twenty-first Century.

Contemporary readers have caught up with Orwell by devouring paperbacks sold for the 75th anniversary.

Sales also spiked for the 75th anniversary editions of 1984 and Animal Farm, both written by George Orwell. Sales of 1984 jumped 192%, to about 19,500 copies sold, putting it 10th place on the bestseller list . . . (https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/96997-dystopian-novels-see-post-inauguration-sales-boost.html)

Because it is so timely and so timeless, I believe 1984 is  the single most crucial reading in the upper high school curriculum. It is not for middle school and  less mature high school readers. It is dark, devious with some focus on sexuality as liberation.  Many parents would feel uncomfortable with Winston and Julia’s passion.

But for mature high school readers it is more essential than Shakespeare. What would the censors say to that?

In May 2023, the Republican governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, signed into law Senate File 496, Mostly, SF 496, which is the subject of an ongoing legal battle, bans books that feature L.G.B.T.Q.+ characters or progressive themes such as feminism or are written by people of color. But the legislation also sweeps up several authors whose works lampoon totalitarianism and that were sent east by the C.I.A. book program, including Aldous Huxley, Kurt Vonnegut and Orwell, whose “1984” and “Animal Farm” are both on banned lists.

Legislation that targets books about censorship is the most diabolical, freedom-sucking attack on human rights we could ignore. It’s happening under our noses, but we’ll miss the odor if we are not heeding the  warnings of Brave New World (Huxley), Player Piano (Vonnegut) and 1984.

Orwell was trained in semantics; he understood how thinking can be altered by language. In 1984 he devised a whole grammar to control thought. One basic strategy was “doublethink,” the automatic mental shift from one meaning to the other. For example, the Party slogan:

War is Peace

Freedom is Slavery

Ignorance is Strength

Can you recognize contemporary examples? You can read all this in the very first chapter of 1984.  No wonder it is considered a dangerous book. No wonder its sales are multiplying.

Censorship may be the mild version of 1984, but there’s a reason some states want to ban it. Books enhance the imagination, and we need a very little stimulus to imagine 1984 in 2025.

Based on Missouri SB 775 The Hate You Give would not be excluded from public school classrooms, because of  its “serious artistic significance.”

The title The Hate U Give is inspired by THUG LIFE, Tupac Shakur’s famous acronym that stood for “The Hate U Give Little Infants F***ks Everybody.” Written from the viewpoint of Starr Carter a 16-year-old African-American girl, it depicts a life lived on the boundary of Black and White neighborhoods, schools, friends, law enforcement and other concerns. It reveals the polarizing perspectives of race, generations, and politics as seldom seen so clearly in Young Adult fiction.

The crime is not that a policeman (“One-Fifteen”) makes the fatal error of shooting a Black male reaching into his car to check on Starr, his passenger. The crime is that city’s citizens line up against each other accusing and defending the action, until a final public rally at the end of the novel grapples with the issues.

The crime would be that young adult and adult readers alike did not pick up or read this book because of the F-bombs, the controversy of policing, or the sexual dilemma of a couple trying to sort out emotional and physical love. No one who cares about these issues will be offended by how Angie Thomas handles them.

If young adults or adults dismissed this novel they would miss

• a diversity of public reaction to a shooting of a Black teenager by a White policeman
• the code switching challenges for Starr, living in a Black community, but attending a private school in a White neighborhood
• the complications of policing represented by Starr’s father, a reformed gang member and her uncle, a Black policeman
• the stress of peer relationships around the shooting, including Starr’s boyfriend and her two girl friends, some of them critical of Starr’s public stand against the shooting
• the dilemma of Starr and her boyfriend, Chris, trying to decide what are their boundaries for intimacy.  Parents would find their decision-making exemplary for teenagers.
• the hold of gangs on reformed former members, grappling with loyalty and moral choices

The tension and resolution of these conflicts makes this book exceptional as honest examination of racial and sexual dilemmas. No issues of race, class or sexuality are examined by simplistic standards of right and wrong.  The novel wades deep into these conflicts and offers readers a thoughtful process for addressing moral and social dilemmas.

Sometimes the books that arouse the most controversy give us the most insight and hope for peace.

Since its publication in 2007 The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie has been the number one challenged and banned book in adolescent fiction.  The censors condemned the book for: “sexual references, profanity, violence, gambling, and underage drinking, and for religious viewpoint.” As usual, they could not see the forest for the trees.

They saw the profanity; they overlooked Rowdy, an abused and violent tragic . They saw the references to “boners” and masturbation; they ignored the humorous insecurity of a 14-year-old.  They noticed “underage drinking,” but they forgot the fatal relationship of Native people with alcohol.

They overlooked that the novel develops deep relationships between a teenager with his best friend, with his parents, with his sister. They missed the moving compassion of his teachers, coaches and his wise grandmother. They missed the transformed relationships with a white girl, a white nerd, and a white team mate. In some cases the relationships are sprinkled with silly profanity, in one case with tame sexuality.

Sherman Alexi was an award-winning script writer before he wrote The Absolutely True Diary. His screenplay, Smoke Signals, won the Audience Award and Filmmaker Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. Later his 2009 collection of short stories and poems War Dances won the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. This young adult novel won the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.  True Diary has some of the poet’s style.

Junior (aka Arnold), the 14-year-old protagonist, makes age-appropriate comments on sex, yet the only sex act in the entire novel is a reference to masturbation, not graphic, but with enough detail to make you laugh or shudder. Pretty normal adolescent thinking, but it would disturb the censors.

Since the story takes place on  a Spokane Indian Reservation, you can expect some hard topics: violence, racism, poverty, child abuse, depression, alcoholism, anorexia, bulimia. In particular alcoholism strains family resources and relationships. This is a well-known issue among Native people.

Because it’s a Reservation you have to expect some implication of white governmental policies in the poverty and alcoholism and depression and violence. The criticism is faintly bitter, a clear indictment of Indian Reservations and their consequences. The struggle of the main character to leave the reservation for a more promising future explains the title “part-time Indian.”

You might have heard it said of the white man’s curriculum “To kill the Indian to save the child.” As his teacher Mr. P told him: “We were supposed to make you give up being Indian. Your songs and stories and language and dancing. Everything.”

Mr. P tells him to leave the reservation to go to a white school and learn to hope. Hope is what was drained from the Spokane Indians as they were “educated.” Hope can only be recovered by leaving the poisoned environment.

The real reason I love this book is for these features I call “poetry:” the white space, the short paragraphs, the drawings, the caricatures of the “Part-time” Indian. It is poetry for the struggling reader offering visual cues and humor and an insecure inner voice.  It is not juvenile; it is adolescent striving toward adulthood.

True Diary has a poetry of  short paragraphs and rough drawings in Junior’s diary. Every important character has labeled drawings with notations like his older sister : “acne scars that somehow make look tough and pretty at the same time;”  “‘distressed'” blue jeans (shoplifted from Macy’s).” These diary drawings substitute for long character descriptions that usually hold back the pace of fiction.

Many secondary teachers dream of an accessible book for their struggling readers that treats them as mature people. This is the answer to that dream.

With the publishing of the “School Reading Report Card” (the National Assessment of Educational Progress) politicians and parents take critical aim the causes of illiteracy.  They blame bad teaching, low standards, poor curriculum,” brainwashing” and recently: Diversity, Equality and Inclusion and its influence on faculty hiring and books assigned.

Literacy is complicated. It involves what you read and with whom, how you read and why you read, where and when you read. Book-banning groups prefer to target a single cause of illiteracy, because that is how they get protesters fired up.

Subject matter alone can create book challenges and bans. Multicultural books like All Boys Aren’t Blue, by George M. Johnson, Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky are the four most challenged for 2024. They are vulnerable targets of the attack on Diversity, Equality and Diversity.

Over the years book banning has even extended to novels we know as “classics” today.  Some of these include Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain), Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck), To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) and 1984 (George Orwell). Some of these books trespassed on forbidden language, such as racial and developmental slurs employed by Twain, Lee, and Steinbeck. Orwell was cited for “pro-communism idea/ sexuality.” He invented his own language.

Restrictions on reading are not the same as censorship, no matter what teachers say. Fahrenheit 451, where objectionable books are destroyed by flame-throwers, is censorship. Eliminating the presence of a book within the geographic borders of a town is de facto censorship, since it creates financial and opportunity barriers to reading a book. Allowing an alternative reading to a book assigned is not censorship, since it meets a literacy goal addressed by its alternative.

In my echo chamber there has been a lot of optimism about polling, promising new candidates, and local activism. I like the positive spin, and I am a fan of Heather Cox Richardson, who cheers us as proponents of democracy. We have to step up for the next election.

Still the pessimist in me wants to warn about the kind of optimism we had in 2024, when the polls seemed to tilt in our favor. Then the silent, but deadly voter stepped up and elected Donald Trump. My personal theory is that we were surprised by the MVWSAS– the Male Voter with Short Attention Span.

I have to be careful here, because that title could easily describe me. Sometimes I lean into the soundbites, and I am not easily persuaded.  Sometimes I look into the mirror and see the MVWSAS, but I am resisting him.

The MVWSAS is a big fan of democracy as long as his team is winning. It is all about winners and losers, as our peerless leader has assured us. This voter will always talk a good game about respecting and supporting our leaders when “our ” leaders are in charge. During the Biden administration we heard a lot about unconstitutional appropriation of power, because the wrong team was on the field. There was a lot of hooting and hollering when Biden assumed charge of alternative energy and environmental regulations. Unconstitutional seizure of power! the opposition cried.

Then the home team came on the field, reversing the environmental reforms; appropriating power from the Department of Justice; establishing tariffs and abolishing the Department of Education without Congressional approval; other expansions of executive authority. No objections from the ruling Party, even from Congress, which, ironically has been completely emasculated.

When you see democracy as a game, there is no contradiction in this thinking. It is no different when you go to a sporting event and harass the umpires or referees, because they don’t give your team a break. When a call goes in your favor, you give them some love. “Now you’re seeing the plate.” “This is a good umpiring crew, isn’t it?”  All the time you are judging the officials depending on whether your team is winning. Sensible, right?

You can see why this voter may rush to the polls to make sure the right officiating is on the field. Otherwise the game is spoiled. These are passionate fans, even if they are not reflective thinkers. They love talk shows and podcasts, where fans run off at the mouth, without giving objective evidence.  If there is evidence, it come with a “home field” advantage.

Another attribute is the “SAS” part of the species. “Short attention span”  is not a sign of low intelligence, but it may entail stubbornness. All members of the political universe could be guilty of this, but the MVWSAS believes it is a virtue to be loyal, rather than flexible.

“Stubbornness” will not be identified in the negative for the “SAS” male, because it is translated as “certainty.” Lack of certainty signals a weak constitution or weak convictions. “Fallibility” does not belong in the MVSAS portfolio.

The portfolio contains a self-assured male with no time / inclination for listening or considering new ideas.  In all fairness, we could describe some female voters the same way, especially when they find solidarity.The MVWSAS not so much.

For some reason many of the MVWSAS fly under the radar, so they don’t record in the polls. They may be what Nixon called the “silent majority.” Some of them are anything but silent. It’s just that we underestimate their numbers. Can’t say why.

This reference group does get not enough notice in the heat of the campaign, especially among women with long attention spans.  They may overestimate the malleability or determination to vote among the MVWSAS. They are not open-minded, but they are registered and loaded for bear.

The answer is simply to get more open-minded voters out to the polls, as the Obama loyalists did once.  The occasional MVWSAS may stray over the line, but they are surely not a good  investment of time. They don’t run in the independent crowd, but they do run, and they vote. We just have to out-hustle them.

When any government official tells you to blame “antifa,” our alarm bells should ring out. We should not nod our heads without thinking and enter the twilight zone of scapegoats. An alert mind will not carelessly slip into someone else’s fantasy without asking: Should I believe this?

The President recently signed an executive order designating “Antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization.  . . . a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law. It uses illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism nationwide to accomplish these goals.” [https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/designating-antifa-as-a-domestic-terrorist-organization/]

“Antifa” is the President’s favorite target. Just as anti-gun organizations automatically blame every shooting on the NRA or the lack of gun regulation, so the President has his own convenient source of violence like the Charlie Kirk assassination.

However, “antifa” is an imagined threat.

“. . the director of the FBI during Trump’s first term, Christopher Wray, explained that antifa, which is short for “antifascist,” is an ideology and not an organization, the executive order says antifa is.”  [https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/trump-signs-order-designating-antifa-as-domestic-terrorist-group]

When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the President was quick to assign blame to the “radical left,” and the next day he officially designated “antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization.” Actually, under the law, there’s no official designation called “domestic terrorist organization.” But it sounds deadly, so why not?

Giving the “domestic terror” status to antifa elevates rumor to fact. Either the President knows it is a rumor, or he has unconsciously merged fantasy into reality. We don’t have to live in the President’s fantasy. If anything, during a crisis we need to keep a grip on reality.

Lack of evidence has never prevented the President from voicing opinions about guilt or innocence or causes of a crime. Generally district attorneys caution public figures from offering their opinions prior to trial, because they could influence the jury.  The President never exercises that caution about guilt or innocence. He wants to influence the verdict of a trial.

It could all be innocent play for an autocrat, until real people get named as members of antifa. Any political activist could qualify as an agent: George Soros (financier), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (U.S. Representative), John Stewart (comedian), all law-abiding citizens from the left-wing. On a bad day the President could claim they were secret associates of antifa.

Raising the specter of a domestic terror organization offers red meat, if you feel hungry to blame someone or something for the tragedies of American life.  Voters can be activated by anger and perceived injury. They will go to the polls to foil anything that can be called a “domestic terror.”

But if you are a voter and want to take a shot at evil, please be sure it is a real evil. Stand for “truth, justice and the American way,” if you are inspired to stand for something. Just make it a real something. Don’t participate in someone else’s fantasy.