Hi, Miss Julie

Heading into Big Beautiful Women Bath and Body Works Banned Books Week (🤮) this year is extra rough. All of my previous hatred of this campaign still seethes deep in my heart, but after four years of dealing with real challenges and the people who make those challenges, my rage has become incandescent.

If I had the power to go back in time to 1982 and convince whomever the decision makers were to NOT go with Banned Books as the branding,¹ I would likely fail, because I am so fed up with all of it that I would probably just scream until I tore a hole in time and space and then I would just fall through that hole for all of eternity, screaming “Why talk about the thing you don’t want (book banning) instead of the thing you DO want (freedom to read)?

Consider what is happening with the 2024 Democratic campaign for president. Instead of trying to terrify everyone with the horrors of a second Xxxxx² presidency like they have for the last too many years, they’re now focusing on what their administration could do to IMPROVE things. Focusing on what people WANT and COULD HAVE instead of continually harping on where we’ve been and how much worse it could get.

It’s not hard to get people to consider the worst case scenario. It’s not difficult to make people afraid, or upset, or angry. To a certain extent, the human brain is wired to focus more on negative emotions and outcomes, so it’s like shooting depression fish in a melancholy barrel. It’s easy to rile people up. We know that rage baiting is all over the internet, because it’s a guaranteed way to get engagement. Getting people angry is easy, and I fall for it as much as anyone else (despite my best efforts to not get drawn in).

Frankly, it’s exhausting to be this angry all the time. I’m tired. I’m tired of people thinking Banned Books are punk rock or rebellious or whatever other fantasy they’ve created in their minds. When books are challenged, it’s upsetting. It’s horrifying. It’s harmful to marginalized people, who are overwhelmingly the ones being attacked by proxy via book bans. It harms the authors who write those books, financially and emotionally. It harms the readers who lose access to those books and those stories. It harms the library workers who have to be subject to aggressive, circular arguments about how we’ve stocked the youth section with pornographic material and how we’re going to go to hell or lose our jobs or any other number of threats.

Photo by Sefa Tekin

Something I’m working on is staying engaged without being enraged. I want to be a part of the solution, but if I burn myself out (even more) I’ll be of no use to anyone, especially myself. Part of the solution to most of life’s problems is to build community and have a network of support. If you’re reading this essay, you’re likely interested in supporting me (or you’re hate-reading because you hate my big mouth, to which I say: “Don’t spend all of your time [….] hating me, Dorothy, learn a trade!”) and/or the same causes I believe in, so if you’d like to do something to give some hope to this tired, angry librarian, I encourage you to do these two things during this misbegotten week:

1. Read everything Kelly Jensen has written about book bans and censorship and realize what the real issues are. And then, if you’ve the time and energy, do something about those issues.
2. Do whatever you can to move yourself, your library, your town, etc, AWAY from banned books and towards Freedom to Read. We should focus on the outcome we want instead of endlessly wallowing in the nightmarish reality we’ve frankly encouraged and fed with decades of banned books week fear-mongering.

Then take a nap. You deserve it.

1. ^{I’d like to do the same for graphic novels, because boy people don’t associate the word “graphic” with images enough; it makes them think of graphic violence or sex, and because of that we’ve really done a disservice to illustrated works by using this term. It’s almost as if language matters?} ↩︎
2. ^{I won’t write his name.} ↩︎