danielle2

In 09 TAG English, we are currently reading Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, a book about a futuristic soceity where the firemen don't prevent fires... they burn books.  The book focuses mainly on censorship of books, and when going through the history of how books were utterly BANNED in this book, it seems almost prophetic (meaning that it's predicting the future, and it's likely to happen).  I'd also like to add that this book was written in 1951 before I continue to quote it...

"Picture It.  Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dog, carts, slow-motion.  Then, in the Twentieth Century, speed up your camera.  Books cut shorter.  Condensations.  Digests.  Tabloids.  Everything boils down to the gag, snap ending."

"Out of the nursery, into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more."

"Politics?  One column, two sentence, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes!  Whirl man's mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnessary, time-wasting thought!"

Books kept getting cut shorter.  No one wanted to read them.  And eventually, intellectuals were considered dangerous.  READING ITSELF was considered dangerous.  And so eventually, any books found were burned.

Ouch, eh?

 Guess what else?  Researching pre-project, our class was off researching censorship in the past few years. 

Could you believe this, if it wasn't me telling you?

Four books by Steven King.

Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.  An American Classic.

1 by William Shakespeare.  SHAKESPEARE!!!

And, here's the kicker, four books by Judy Blume, including Superfudge.

It's wow...

So why is it that people are so easily enraged by a book?  Don't they see they banning something, only makes people want to read it more?  Don't they know that if they look hard enough... any tiny detail could be found offensive.  ANYTHING.

It's frustrating honestly, and I'm sorry to say that some of the things in this book have come true.

Who's to say that it won't eventually happen, that books won't eventually be made illegal?

It's quite silli, if I do say so myself.